Based on Tuesday’s readings, we talked about how creativity can be described as both “novelty and usefulness.” I personally do not agree with this definition of creativity because there is no standard metric by which we can define usefulness nor novelty (to some extent). When I think of creativity, I think of “a personal touch, meaning that is deeply personal and authenticity.” After today’s discussion with the CS professors, I began to reflect more on how creativity is not always about one’s self, because we are often inspired by others and that in itself can spur bursts of creativity.

My group’s chosen poet was Dr. Seuss and one of our prompts to ChatGPT was to” use the settings and era from which Dr. Seuss was from, Dr. Seuss’s life story /background, audience, rhythm, rhyme scheme, etc., to write a poem.” We got the following output to our prompt:

On Maple Street, past the cracked old sign,​

Lived a kid named Jake in ‘09.​

He rode his bike past Miller’s store,​

Where the bell still rings on the squeaky door.​

His mom yelled, “Dinner!” at half past six,​

Same as always; meatloaf, potatoes, and Fix.​

(That’s the soda his dad always drank on ice,​

Said, “Not too warm and not too nice.”)​

The bus came early on cold fall days,​

With fog on the windows and sleepy haze.​

Ms. Carter would greet with a nod and a grin,……

​In my opinion, this output from ChatGPT was not creative, but it had some interesting characteristics. For example, the entirety of the poem rhymed and there was also good imagery throughout. However, it seemed very generic and inauthentic. The writing seemed like words that were put together based on their ability to rhyme and it lacked that personal touch connected to one’s own deeply meaningful story.

Nevertheless, this was not very surprising as AI produces output based on the millions of data it’s been trained on, and so the output it provides is not original and is instead based on the datasets and the probability of the next token approach that LLMs in this case use. For example, in our reading from Tuesday, Ashish Bhatia spoke about how creativity is traditionally defined as something that demonstrates both novelty and usefulness (Bhatia, 2025). And so although this poem might be classified as useful, it cannot necessarily be classified as novel because it is not authentic and it’s based on preexisting data and information. In the same reading we saw how psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talked about how AI doesn’t labor through ambiguity nor does it explore. This is exemplified in the ChatGPT poem, as it is very generic and lacks fluidity.

Overall, our experiments this week shifted my thinking about creativity and AI and made me more aware of the limitations AI has in terms of creativity, and how AI though useful in a huge range of scenarios, is not as well-versed when it comes to creative work. However, AI models are constantly evolving and being trained and so that might change.

Source: Bhatia, A. (2025, April 4). The artifact isn’t the art: Rethinking creativity in the age of AI. Freethink; Freethink Media. https://www.freethink.com/opinion/studio-ghibli-chatgpt-creativity?utm_source=tldrai