Moving beyond LLMs to codify creativity: introducing INSIGHTS

Experts at the Institute for Creativity and AI have developed a new digital tool that aims to help organisations explore solutions for their creative requirements.

Traditional large language model (LLM) platforms, like ChatGPT, incrementally build knowledge and creativity based on high volumes of information. While this is a valuable tool in the implementation of chatbots, which can help businesses generate ideas and improve results, LLMs are restricted to information available to them and lack the ability to explore new spaces for creativity.

INSIGHTS has been developed to combine generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) with structured creative-thinking models to source new ideas. It uses ‘opportunity spaces’ to identify and link different requirements, while suggesting new ones which may not have yet been conceived.

The platform integrates four core creativity functions with overlapping characteristics – exploring new spaces of opportunity, defining these spaces, measuring novelty, and identifying individual creative qualities. It operationalises these functions by scanning through written files and uses BERTopic, an unsupervised machine learning technique, to create clusters of semantically related information that each represent an opportunity space.

Using GPT prompts, INSIGHTS then allows users to select specific spaces and define their levels of desired creative novelty. Opportunities are presented in three categories, with four to eight broad spaces, eight to 15 ‘typical’ spaces, and 15 to 30 narrow spaces.

Developing INSIGHTS

A new paper published by the developers, titled Beyond Just Generative AI for Discovering Software Opportunities, introduces the concepts and development of INSIGHTS. The paper presents steps in development and feedback from two case studies of the tool, tested within manufacturing company Miele and a biomass power plant in Thailand.

Case Study 1: Miele (appliance manufacturer)

A team of 10 people responsible for dishwasher innovation used INSIGHTS during a five-hour workshop. They loaded 468 information documents into the tool, which in turn generated nine broad opportunity spaces, 28 narrow and 19 typical.

Participants were able to assess the opportunities and input further documents to broaden the range of ideas. Furthermore, because the group contained specialists in both engineering and marketing with different needs, participants were keen to seek distinct opportunity areas – namely technical and business growth.

Case Study 2: Thai biomass power company

A further 10 stakeholders in a biomass power plant used INSIGHTS as they looked to find alternative uses for the ash biproduct of renewable production. One hundred PDF files from systematic analysis were input, creating six problem/solution opportunity spaces, including biomass ash, waste initiatives and business trends.

Compared with traditional brainstorming, INSIGHTS produced longer, more diverse, and more detailed opportunities – spanning fashion, home design, and energy sector.

The Institute for Creativity and AI at City St George’s, University of London was launched in October 2024, to serve as a strategic collaboration space and integrate pioneering interdisciplinary research on AI technologies with creative practitioners.

Neil Maiden, Professor of Digital Creativity at Bayes Business School and Director of the Institute, said INSIGHTS went beyond traditional Generative AI and machine learning.

“Large Language Models, while helpful, are not capable of much more than incremental creativity,” he said.

“They are also limited by content used to generate them in the first place.

“We talk to many businesses who experience this issue, and our software is a potential alternative for them to solve problems creatively.

“INSIGHTS uses different forms of AI beyond LLMs which have been codified in its development, orchestrating steps in the creative process. This means it is more bespoke for users, and capable of more radical creative outcomes.”

Read more about the Institute for Creativity and AI.

Find out more about INSIGHTS and arrange a demo.