Using AI to enhance combinatorial creativity

As most experts in the field of creativity will tell you, ideas tend to simply be recombinations of existing elements. Croissant and doughnut, cronut. Croissant and muffin, cruffin. Sawdust and disappointment, muesli. I've got a tool in my site that helps you with this exercise. It throws two random objects your way and challenges you to combine them into something new. I use it a lot in workshops to warm up people's creative minds, and it's the kind of exercise that ChatGPT is perfect at because not only will it give you two random objects to smoosh together, but it will also give you feedback and what you came up with, helping you improve your skills each time you do the exercise. Right. Time to put myself to the test. Okay. Now we're using Claude by Anthropic. It gives a similar kind of quality to ChatGPT, and I just want to show you that there's other options. If you are not signed up to Claude and you're looking for the link, then if you go along to my resources page here, then you'll be able to get the link so that you can sign up yourself. It's free, don't worry. Right. Let me paste in here our prompt. I'll read it out to you. "I want to develop my creative ability to combine two objects or concepts to create an entirely new idea. Please provide me with two random objects and ask me to combine them to come up with a new idea. Then stop and wait for my response. After I have responded, I want you to give me feedback on my idea. The connection between the objects can be physical, linguistic, or conceptual. Assess my response for originality and descriptiveness." Here we go. Let's see what it gives us. "Okay, let's try this creativity exercise. Here are two random objects for you to combine: umbrella and cupcake. How would you combine these two things into a new creative idea?" I'm going to ponder this for a couple of minutes and then I will put my answer in. Let's see what I come up with here. Okay. So we had cupcake, we had umbrella. I imagine taking umbrella, turning it upside down, and we use that as a design for a platform. So there's a circular platform in the bottom, a road coming up ending in a hook. So it's just like a flattened, upside-down umbrella. And in a coffee shop, they will put pastries and cakes on that. When somebody orders, they will then attach that to a string and it will slide down the string to the person's table. And it's just a way of adding theatre as an interesting way of delivering food to somebody using this umbrella. You can have your cupcakes on it. Right. Let's see what Claude from Anthropic makes of this. "I really like the creativity and imagination behind your idea! Combining an umbrella and a cupcake into a novel food delivery system is quite clever. The visual of pastries sliding down from the counter to the table on little umbrella platforms is whimsical and entertaining." That was the idea, trying to get a bit of a Mary Poppins thing in there. "You took two seemingly unrelated objects and fused them into an entirely new concept. The specificity, I would struggle pronouncing that word, in describing the upside-down umbrella base with a hook and string system shows good detail and development of the initial idea. Overall, excellent work. I appreciate the originality and descriptiveness of your response. Keep exercising your creative muscles." Yes, please do. "You have a real knack for inventive ideation." Right. What I want to say here now is, please can you give me your own idea, combining an umbrella with a cupcake, and let's see what Claude comes up with for this. "Okay, here's an idea I came up with to combine an umbrella and a cupcake. Edible umbrella cupcake toppers." Interesting. "These would be small decorative umbrellas made out of cookie or fondant that could be used as cake toppers for cupcakes. The umbrellas could come in a variety of bright colors and designs, with the edges rimmed and sprinkles to look like raindrops." Oh, like that. "They would provide whimsy and fun decoration for any cupcake or cake." Okay. So they've gone quite literal there, creating miniature umbrella decorations for the tops of cupcakes. I really like the idea of sprinkles looking like rain. That could be really, really quite sweet. So this can just be a way of prompting you to try harder again to come up with your ideas. But it doesn't just have to be about you. You can always throw the question back to the AI to see what the AI comes up with. All right. Here's something I think you should combine: your brain and this prompt. Make it a regular activity, and who knows what amazing ideas you'll come up with. You might even come up with the next big thing. How about a croissant and a pizza base? What would you call that, a crizza? Actually, that's not a bad idea. I think I'll write that one down. Yeah. What's wrong with... Oh, yeah, I think I'll use a pencil.