How to ideate with AI—be unsatisfied, fickle and hard to please
Basically the opposite of ideating with humans...
AI tools like Chat GPT can be really great for ideating….or so you’ve been told by a thousand breathless YouTube videos (if you’re like me).
But when we ask it to come up with ideas for our work challenges, the results can be underwhelming. To me, it feels like I’m getting an amalgamation of every basic thing written on the blogosphere. Maybe there’s one sort of interesting idea—maybe. It’s easy to see that, say “meh AI can’t help me very much”, and then go back to life as normal.
And that would be a mistake!
Cutting Edge AI-Assisted Ideation Research
New 2024 research from
and out of Stanford (download here) shows that teams that used Chat GPT to ideate on work challenges came away with more average ideas than similar groups using traditional, non-AI ideation sessions (aka what I host all the time). BINGO - AI skeptics, they proved what we all intuitively knew! But wait….The Secret to Ideating with AI
Teams that got average ideas with AI treated it more like “an oracle”, as the study authors call it. Those teams saw Chat GPT’s first answer, thought it seemed pretty good, and said “OK great now we can go to lunch”. But the teams that were dissatisfied with Chat GPT’s output, and pushed it to keep iterating ideas, outperformed all teams by a mile, including the non-AI, traditional ideation session teams.
How to do this in Practice
I have been pushing Chat GPT for better ideas for a while, and have some follow-up prompts you can try:
Initial Example Prompt #1
Please take on the role of an expert marketing executive, and give me 10 ideas for an Instagram campaign for my shoe brand.
Example Follow-up Prompts
OK, most of these aren’t that exciting. But #7 is kinda interesting, can you give me 10 more like that?
I’m feeling like I’ve seen a lot of these answers before. Can you try to make weird and unusual connections, and really push the boundaries?
Can you combine ideas #2 and #8 together, into 10 new combinations?
These ideas are a good start, but can you generate 10 new ideas that specifically evoke strong emotions, like joy, surprise, or nostalgia?
What are 10 new campaign ideas that include an unexpected element, like a surprise gift or collaboration with an unusual partner?
Find 10 different niches or subgenres on Instagram. Can you come up with an idea for my shoe brand that would appeal to each of them?
Can you search the internet and find the 10 best tips for how to make an Instagram campaign that gets people to stop their scroll (or insert whatever your ideation challenge is). Now taking each of those 10 best tips, come up with an Instagram campaign idea for my shoe brand that pays off on one of those tips.
As you can see, it’s important to find the fun in it. Make it feel like a playful conversation, where you’re pushing and pushing the bot to deliver novel ideas.
The craziest thing is, if you ever want more follow-up prompts to push Chat GPT - just ask it directly! Aka “what follow up questions can I ask chat gpt to push it to keep getting better ideas, after an initial 10 ideas?”. Chat GPT will have all kinds of great ideas for you. But remember, it’s ultimately up to you to figure out what is actually useful and relevant, vs what is just LLM re-tread garbage. Be dissatisfied! Push the bots, and they will deliver for you.
Thanks for reading
Devin
P.S. if your team has an offsite/onsite this year, I’ve recently run ones for Sony, ABC, Biogen…I’d love to help you achieve your goals through fun. Let’s talk.