ChatGPT and ideation
ongoing
AI is creativity's double-edged sword: ChatGPT accelerates idea generation but crushes creative confidence. This study with 35 design students revealed that while AI makes ideation faster, it narrows creative exploration—students get efficient but play it safe. Most surprisingly, participants became their own control group, generating dramatically different work with versus without AI, proving the tool doesn't just assist creativity—it fundamentally reshapes how we think.
Graduation Project by Louise Fernandes Krajcer
This experimental research project explored the complex relationship between artificial intelligence and human creativity by investigating how ChatGPT influences design students’ ideation processes. The central creative component involved a controlled creative experiment where 35 design students generated ideas under two distinct conditions: with and without ChatGPT assistance.
Using Glăveanu’s 5A’s creativity framework as a theoretical lens, the study creatively mapped how AI impacts the creative actors (students), actions (ideation behaviors), and artifacts (design concepts) produced. The research design itself was innovative, combining quantitative concept analysis with qualitative thematic exploration to capture both measurable creative outputs and nuanced human experiences.
The creative methodology included within-group experimentation that allowed each participant to serve as their own control, generating comparable creative work across both conditions. This approach revealed fascinating contradictions: while ChatGPT accelerated idea generation, it simultaneously diminished students’ creative confidence and potentially constrained their exploration of the creative possibility space.
The project’s creative insight lies in its balanced investigation approach—neither celebrating nor condemning AI, but rather examining the nuanced ways technology reshapes creative practice. Through interviews and open-ended questioning, the research captured the lived experience of creativity in the age of AI, offering evidence-based recommendations for educators and practitioners seeking to integrate AI tools without compromising human creative agency.
This study demonstrates how rigorous creative research can illuminate the complex dynamics between human and artificial intelligence in creative work.
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