AI field report: Kickstart out-of-the-box thinking with GenAI
Coffee at sea, lateral thinking, and more...
Ahoy fellow adventurers,
Growing up, I always loved lateral thinking puzzles. Not that they were easy, but I loved the challenge of solving problems from a different angle. And whether my friends and I came up with the answers ourselves or peeked at the solutions, there was some brief magic to behold once you changed your perspective and saw the world ever so slightly differently.
We’ve been playing around with using GenAI tools to facilitate lateral thinking (also known as thinking outside the box) - and we think this is a great use case. Today, let’s explore how to some playful and absurdist use cases that can help trigger new ways of viewing business and strategic thinking.
In this issue:
Case study: Use GenAI to Accelerate Lateral Thinking
Spotlight: The Most Popular AI-powered Tools
What we’re reading this week
Case Study: Use GenAI to Accelerate Lateral Thinking
Ever since there was a box - human nature being what it is - there have been humans thinking up ways to think outside of it. Phaedrus wrote about the upside of adopting this approach many centuries ago, capturing the importance of occasionally taking a break from serious thinking and engaging in distractions. At AI Adventure Club, we wholeheartedly agree - and like to leverage playfulness to accelerate learning.
“The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking.”
―Phaedrus
Besides the fact that Phaedrus recommended it, why should you care about lateral thinking? There are a lot of benefits…
Develop creative ideas and solutions that might be missed with ‘traditional’ approaches
Think from the perspective of different groups and viewpoints
Increase your own level of reasoning over time
We thought GenAI tools such as Perplexity would be great at enabling lateral or outside the box thinking - and out tests proved our hypothesis. Here is our 3-step template for kickstarting your own lateral thinking:
Tell your LLM of choice that it should build a product from the ground up and you want it to share its product strategy with you. Depending on your use case, you can also ask for an overview of its related operations, marketing, and communications strategies.
Add a line that encourages the LLM to engage in lateral thinking. Suggested dimensions include playing with time (“in the 1800s”), place (“in a cave”), or duration (“only on Sundays”). Feel free to come up with other constraints.
Read through the LLM’s creative suggestions. Of course, in most cases you won’t want to build the proposed product - but you can use the ideas to challenge your own thinking about the product you really are building. We found plenty of inspiration in the often absurd responses.
Below are a few place-based prompts we ran through Perplexity and some of its responses. Our thoughts on Perplexity’s responses are in the brackets:
Imagine you were building Starbucks from the ground up, but locations had to be built on boats at sea instead of buildings on land. Walk me through your strategy and operations.
Brand Identity: Adapt Starbucks' iconic mermaid logo to emphasize the maritime theme. [We thought it was an intriguing idea to tap into the maritime origins of the Starbucks name. It left us curious why Starbucks never went this route. Also worth noting, coffee has been shipped by sea to the U.S. since the 1600s!]
Implement strict waste management protocols to protect marine ecosystems. [A lot of plastic waste ends up in the oceans today, making this an important priority even for land-based operations.]
Imagine you were building a grocery store from the ground up, but locations had to be built on boats at sea instead of buildings on land. Walk me through your strategy and operations.
Implement vertical farming techniques on larger vessels to grow fresh produce on board. [We’re fascinated by the idea of picking store-fresh produce directly from a grocer’s vertical farming towers.]
Implement a delivery service using smaller boats for last-mile delivery to individual vessels or coastal homes. [Probably not a huge market, but we could envision Instacart piloting this one day.]
Imagine you were building a movie theater from the ground up, but locations had to be built on boats at sea instead of buildings on land. Walk me through your strategy and operations.
"Cinema on the Waves" – A one-of-a-kind experience combining breathtaking ocean views with immersive movie screenings. [Just imagine: a drive-in with boats instead of cars? Seats that gently rock your baby to sleep so you don’t need a babysitter for date-night? A movie theater built like a pirate ship deck that exclusively shows Pirates of the Caribbean marathons? Please someone build these!]
Try out your own prompts, mateys, and let us know what treasure you find!
Spotlight
A ranking of the most popular AI-powered tools [ExplodingTopics]
ExplodingTopics’ approach:
This is a detailed list of the most popular AI tools in 2024, ranked by total monthly website visits.
Traffic data was collected from Semrush and Similarweb, two reliable keyword research and web analytics platforms.
We also calculated the total traffic volume of all 20 tools to generate the estimated market share for each individual AI tool. All traffic data comes from August 2024 traffic estimates.
What we’re reading this week
“Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?”
Writer/director Paul Schrader was stunned by ChatGPT’s movie ideas. [Variety]
“Some of the weirdness of AI is actually more human-like than it first appears. Small changes to a query to an LLM can result in wildly different responses, a problem known as prompt sensitivity. But, as any survey researcher can tell you, humans behave this way, too. The phrasing of a question in an opinion poll can have drastic impacts on the answers.”
AI Mistakes Are Different Than Human Mistakes [IEEE]
“A speaker at this year’s CES said something I thought was interesting. ‘Creative can be produced using 100% GenAI, but Creativity will never be.’ Human creativity will always be the driver of successful ads. But AI can augment that by offering more versions and different experiments to test out human creative ideas. By their very nature, LLMs are designed to leverage what has already been done, whereas humans can imagine what has never before been done.”
Can AI replace human creativity? [Cynopsis]
Adventure on.