AI as a tool for fostering creativity 🎨

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Welcome back, Superhuman

Inventions and ideas as varied as the sewing machine, the Bohr atomic model, and the movie “The Terminator” are said to have first come to their creators in dreams. Now, researchers want to see if AI could have a similar effect on our creativity.

Today’s Insights

• OpenAI’s non-disclosure agreements face scrutiny

• Tutorial: How to expand images with Freepik

• Everything else you should know today

• How AI affects our creativity

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: The real “House of the Dragon”

NEXT IN AI

OpenAI faces criticism over its whistleblower policies

What if you thought your company was doing something wrong — but you felt you had no way of speaking out against it? That’s the predicament some OpenAI employees say they’ve lately found themselves in. In a complaint to the SEC, whistleblowers claim they were asked to sign away their right to send tips to government regulators — meaning they had to keep quiet about safety concerns. 

Why are some employees fearful? They say that in order to stay ahead of its competition, OpenAI is rushing out models that haven’t been fully vetted. In one case, the Sam Altman-led startup allegedly planned a GPT-4o release party even before it had started testing the new model’s safety features. By then, some employees felt there was no going back — it was coming out, one way or another. Meanwhile, restrictive non-disclosure agreements had made it impossible for them to voice their concerns.

What’s OpenAI’s response? It says it welcomes criticism from both inside and outside the company. A spokesperson admitted GPT-4o’s release had been “stressful for our teams” but maintained that the company didn’t skimp on testing. 

Why now? The complaint comes at a pivotal time for OpenAI. It thinks it's on the verge of a new breakthrough: A model with high-level reasoning capabilities, which could scan the internet or complete in-depth research on its one. One project codenamed “Strawberry” will be able to plan for the future and anticipate how the world reacts to decisions. Reuters reported that a recent version had scored over 90% on a competition-level math test.

Those innovations might be adding to employees’ concerns: As AI becomes more sophisticated, its risks to the public also start to multiply. Criticism might continue to mount unless OpenAI can prove it’s willing to pause upcoming releases until it’s certain they’re safe. It might already be starting to get the message: The company recently pushed back the release of its much-hyped voice assistant by a month so that it could first go through more testing.

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AI AT WORK

How to expand images with Freepik

• Go to the Freepik Picasso website.

• Choose the Expand option from the list.

• Sign up with your account to get 3 uses each day.

• Upload your image and place it according to the frame you want to expand.

• Explain in the prompt box how you want the image to expand.

• Click on the Expand button and wait for a few seconds.

• Your image is now expanded

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Power Play: Alphabet is looking to purchase cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billion. If the deal goes through, it’ll be the company’s largest-ever acquisition.

• Speed Demon: HP has claims its new OmniBook Ultra is now the “world’s fastest AI PC” with 55 TOPS for AI tasks and up to 21 hours of battery life.

• Robo Reconnaissance: The US military’s Indo-Pacific command says it will hand out contracts worth $3 billion to AI companies who can help it analyze ground, aerial, and space-based intelligence.

• Asphalt Angst: The city of San Francisco has apprehended the culprit behind a series of tire slashings that damaged more than a dozen Waymo self-driving cars.

• Identity Crisis: The European Union has brought charges against Elon Musk’s X because it allowed anyone to buy a blue check “verification,” making it more difficult for users to discern legitimate accounts from fake ones.

😄 One Fun Thing: Podcaster Kay Savetz has rediscovered a series of long-lost radio interviews with Bill Gates that make reference to AI. Recorded in 1984, Gates predicts that computers will one day “learn and recognize what it is you’re trying to do” and respond accordingly. He also warned that the term AI is “kind of loaded right now.” Apparently, some things never change.

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AI & ART

Can AI help stoke our creativity?

Artists have all sorts of rituals for cultivating creativity, from spending time in nature to free-journaling to contemplating their favorite works of art. Now, researchers at the University of Exeter are exploring whether AI could be another tool that helps shake loose the ideas that might be hiding in our brains.

Here’s how they did it: To test AI’s effects on creativity, the researchers asked 300 people to write eight-sentence stories. Some wrote their stories entirely from scratch while others got to first use ChatGPT to brainstorm. Then, 600 people rated those stories based on their novelty — how truly original they were — and their usefulness — how well they stood up to professional writing.

The results: Getting some story seeds from ChatGPT turned out to help most participants, especially those who don’t tend to be as creative in their everyday lives. In fact, people who got five story ideas from the AI model performed about 9% better than their peers. But that wasn’t consistent across the board. 

Digging Deeper: While AI improved individuals’ scores, it also flattened the results overall. It means that an overreliance on AI could actually dampen creativity on a societal level. The findings suggest that AI should be used for creative pursuits, but with care, especially since models generate lots of cliches and mixed metaphors alongside the truly original stuff. While AI can’t entirely replace our other creative habits, it can still serve as a valuable brainstorming assistant, especially when we’re in a writing rut.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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✅ Audioscribe: Turn scrambled, messy thoughts into a well-structured note with AI.

✅ Ariglad: Use AI to analyze support tickets, then auto-maintain your company’s help center.

✅ Calypso: An AI-first public equities copilot that can analyze financials, transcripts, headlines, and case studies.

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AI-GENERATED IMAGES

The Real House of the Dragon

Midjourney Prompt: vintage 1800s photo of a massive dragon in a nest in Kentucky, a group of elderly woman caring for them, sepia filter
--chaos 33 --ar 9:16 --stylize 250 

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🧞 Your wish is my command 

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team

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