of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as audio, text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers to businesses and governments is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.
And finally, companies have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. Organizations focus on synthesizing a host of customer requirements but struggle to produce a comprehensive solution that will appeal to the community at large. The authors prompted Midjourney to produce an image combining an elephant and a butterfly; they dubbed this creation “phantafly” . Then the authors prompted Stable Diffusion to generate designs for chairs and for artisanal chocolates inspired by “phantafly” .Rapidly and inexpensively producing a plethora of designs in this way allows a company to evaluate a wide range of product concepts quickly.
Here’s an example of this process. We asked Stable Diffusion to generate generic designs of crab-inspired toys but provided it with no functional specifications. Then we imagined functional capabilities after seeing the designs. For instance, in the collection of crab-inspired toys shown below, the image in the top left could be developed into a wall-climbing toy; the image next to it could be a toy that launches a small ball across a room.
It stated that the pros of an education program for consumers were increasing consumer awareness of the meaning of different expiration labels and helping them make more-informed decisions about food purchases and waste. But ChatGPT warned that this education program could be overly complex because expiration dates are not standardized across all food products.
Using ChatGPT’s assessments, it would be relatively easy to evaluate these three concepts, or quickly score or organize them based on the criteria that matter most.Generative AI tools can solve an important challenge faced in idea contests: combining or merging a large number of ideas to produce much stronger ones. For example, an organization that is trying to win a contract or a grant to develop a food-waste-reduction program can use the tools to combine the three concepts discussed earlier.