ChatGPT’s Creative Side

Spring 2025
Scott Pett ’22

We all know ChatGPT has forever changed how we do business. It’s modified how we access information, compose content and analyze data. It’s revolutionized the future of work and education, and it has transformed the way we interact with technology.

New research contends that AI software like ChatGPT can enhance our problem-solving abilities, especially with everyday challenges. Jaeyeon Chung of Rice Business and Byung Cheol Lee of the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business recently published their findings in Nature Human Behaviour. Whether coming up with gifts for your teenage niece or pondering what to do with an old tennis racket, ChatGPT has a unique ability to generate creative ideas.

“Creative problem-solving often requires connecting different concepts in a cohesive way,” Chung says. “ChatGPT excels at this because it pulls from a vast range of data, enabling it to generate new combinations of ideas.”

Chung and Lee sought to answer a central question: Can ChatGPT help people think more creatively than traditional search engines? To answer this, they conducted five experiments.

Each experiment asked participants to generate ideas for solving challenges, such as how to repurpose household items. Depending on the experiment, participants were divided into one of two or three groups: one that used ChatGPT, one that used conventional web search tools such as Google, and one that used no external tool at all. The resulting ideas were evaluated by both laypeople and business experts based on two critical aspects of creativity: originality and appropriateness (i.e., practicality).

In one standout experiment, participants were asked to come up with an idea for a dining table that doesn’t exist on the market. The ChatGPT group came up with suggestions like a “rotating table,” a “floating table” and even “a table that adjusts its height based on the dining experience.” According to both judges and experts, the ChatGPT group consistently delivered the most creative solutions.
 

ChatGPT is an incredible tool for tweaking and improving existing ideas, but when it comes to disruptive innovation, humans still hold the upper hand.
 

On average, across all experiments, ideas generated with ChatGPT were rated 15% more creative than those produced by traditional methods. This was true even when tasks were specifically designed to require empathy or involved multiple constraints — tasks we typically assume humans might be better at performing.

However, Chung and Lee also found a caveat: While ChatGPT excels at generating ideas that are “incrementally” new — meaning they build on existing concepts — it struggles to produce “radically” new ideas that break from established patterns. “ChatGPT is an incredible tool for tweaking and improving existing ideas, but when it comes to disruptive innovation, humans still hold the upper hand,” Chung notes.

For professionals in creative fields like product design or marketing, the study holds especially significant implications. The ability to rapidly generate fresh ideas can be a game-changer in industries where staying ahead of trends is vital.

Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung is the William S. Mackey Jr. Distinguished Assistant Professor at Rice Business. Byung Cheol Lee is assistant professor at the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.