Boost creative thinking with AI

How creative thinking is evaluated

Creative thinking doesn’t happen in a void: instead, there are taxonomies that illustrate how people develop and nurture their abilities to form valuable ideas. Two of the most significant ways to categorize creative thinking include:

Frank Williams’ Taxonomy

Educational psychology researcher Frank Williams identified eight types of thinking in a hierarchy. These abilities include:

1. Fluency: Generating ideas, answers, or responses to a given situation or problem
2. Flexibility: Developing different alternatives to the original situation
3. Originality: Assessing how new or unique a solution is
4. Elaboration: Expanding or improving ideas to make them clearer or more effective
5. Risk-taking: Experimenting and trying new challenges
6. Complexity: Structuring a given situation logically, especially to identify missing elements
7. Curiosity: Wondering about, contemplating, or predicting unknown situations
8. Imagination: Visualizing or forming mental pictures to explore new possibilities

This list has been useful in the field of gifted education, enabling educators to foster lateral thinking and creativity.

Torrance Creative Thinking Test

Another way to assess an individual’s creativity are the Torrance Tests, a creativity assessment used to measure and refine creative potential. First administered in Minnesota in 1958 at the elementary level, the Torrance creative thinking framework evaluated responses based on the following four scales:

• Fluency: the total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to a stimulus
• Flexibility: the number of different categories of relevant responses
• Originality: the statistical rarity of a response
• Elaboration: the amount of detail generated in a response

These two frameworks attempt to quantify the otherwise intangible and difficult-to-explain nature of human creativity. Today, with modern generative AI tools, it’s possible to develop creativity assessments that provide individuals with data-driven insights into their creative strengths. This helps them identify their approach to problem-solving and innovation.

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AI-powered creative thinking activities

AI enhances creative thinking by introducing a variety of engaging activities, such as asking individuals to form associations between seemingly random words or image pairings. By embracing the unexpected, people are able to make connections they might not have considered otherwise, while mentally building the logical connections that help the mind think in new and unconventional ways.

Prompts for enhancing creativity and eliminating mental blocks

Creative blocks are often frustrating, but AI provides solutions to reignite inspiration. By analyzing past work, AI can suggest new directions or provide alternative approaches. See how AI helps boost creative thinking with sample prompts:

• Generate a starting point for a short story that uses the phrase “Chekhov’s gun.”
• Create a 10-question creativity assessment based on the Torrance creative thinking framework.
• Analyze the following painting and describe how the color blue is used to enhance mood.
• Review the uploaded sketch and suggest ways to improve my drawing technique.
• Rewrite the following sentence while maintaining the character’s tone.
• Suggest potential plots for a one-act play based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet to help me overcome a creative block.
• Explain how AI enhances creativity in mind mapping and list ways to implement it in my work group.

While AI tools cannot replace human ingenuity, its role in creative fields continues to grow, serving as a valuable partner in boosting creative thinking. By incorporating creative thinking exercises and leveraging creativity tests, you can gain deeper insights into the creative styles of the writers and artists you admire, while discovering sophisticated AI-driven tools—such as those in Microsoft 365—that unlock your problem-solving skills.