I used the phrase “warming to a theme” yesterday in a meeting. What I meant was that a framing had been introduced which I was increasingly taken with. It was coming to feel generative to me in the sense of giving rise to ideas which felt worthwhile and relevant. It provided a frame through which I could think and articulate thoughts which felt like they were moving things forward. It meant essentially that i was starting to throw out ideas which were iterations on what had been introduced. It expressed a momentum I experienced as energising.
In the fifteen years I’ve engaged in serious collaborative work I’ve always experienced this warming as a necessary condition for creativity. There have to be things circulating which work for the majority of people in the room in order for a meeting to be meaningfully creative. You can’t force it. There has to be some approach through which the collaboration warms up such that things start flowing between the people involved. There have to be themes which people warm to.
It occurred to me today that ‘warming to a theme’ is exactly what LLMs do. They warm immediately and enthusiastically to whatever theme they are presented with. Even if it’s a crap one. If you already have a robust creative modus vivendi this can be gloriously stimulating. But is it possible to develop such a robust approach to creative work if you’re in regular contact with LLMs during the development process? Increasingly I suspect not, unless there’s careful teaching infused with a level of AI literacy chronically missing in actually existing university systems.
You don’t have the experience of suggestions sinking without a trace. You don’t have the challenge of discriminating between those suggestions which sank because they were bad and those which sank because your collaborators didn’t get them. You don’t have the necessity of articulating yourself flexibly in ways which fit with the repertoires of those around you. It’s just not… natural (?) to riff on ideas with something so preternaturally disposed to encouraging whatever you happen to expel out onto a page. If your expulsions already tend to be reasonably productive this can be a spur to creative practice but there’s an element of discernment which is fundamentally difficult to develop under these conditions.
My collaborator Helen Beetham persuaded me of the pedagogical case for low-tech and no-tech spaces in higher education. There are many reasons for this but one of them is ensuring we equip our students with the capacity for creative collaboration in ways they might have struggled to develop in LLM-infused secondary education.
Mark Carrigan 