Staying outside the box: a critical approach to students’ use of GenAI

Does using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) make students less inspired and consequently diminishes their creativity and out-of-the box thinking? This question is important to higher education institutions’ (HEI) educators as our goal is to train students to become professionals and to take part in finding creative solutions that address the upcoming challenges of modern organisations and our societies.

Consequently, HEIs should critically reflect upon their role and direction in teaching and guiding students’ practical utilisation of GenAI. We suggest that educators not only should but must support students’ utilisation of how to use GenAI creatively, thus, enhancing their divergent thinking ability and overall learning outcomes.

The importance of understanding how GenAI works

When GenAI is used in learning environments that call upon students’ creativity and innovation, both learners and educators should understand humans’ relative strengths and weaknesses in these processes. A recent study provides evidence for creativity to diminish when GenAI is utilized to support ideation (Wadinambiarachchi et al. 2024). In the study, students were in three groups performing the same creative task of designing an avatar for a chatbot. The first group did not use any technology, the second group was able to use traditional technology (Google Image Search), and the third group did utilize GenAI. The results show that the group using GenAI scored last in divergent thinking, variety, and originality.

Although we should be critical using GenAI for learning, it provides convincing merits for students. GenAI may help overcome initial creativity barriers or make innovating processes faster (Wadinambiarachchi et al. 2024). Hence, GenAI can accelerate a creative and divergent thinking process in its earliest stages. Additionally, augmentation can play a central role in learner-AI interaction. Augmentation refers to a process where learners collaborate closely with technology (cf. Raisch & Krakowski 2021) – such as GenAI – to complete or perform a task.

In an ideal situation, high augmentation with GenAI integrates learners’ creativity and enhances their problem-solving and idea generation (Holmström et al. 2024).

For augmentation to happen, students need to see these merits and understand how GenAI produces its output. In other words, as educators, we must directly address that GenAI relies on a Large Language Model, which produces its answers on plain averages and does not consider ‘thought outliers’ or ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking. But exploring these outer horizons is essential for fostering innovation and creativity.

Consequently, when students utilise GenAI for generating outcomes for creative tasks in learning environments, these outcomes can become mediocre, plain, and uninspiring too, while students remain under the impression of being very creative.

The utilisation of GenAI is an evolving process

We are convinced that the merits of GenAI should not be too quickly discarded for plain efficiency and effectiveness. Strauß (2021) reminds us, that artificial intelligence usage may cause bias, when there is a mismatch between technology and user routines. When identifying a mismatch between technology and users’ objectives, either the thinking or the actions must change, otherwise the technology to better fit human needs will be adapted. We suggest, that educators could both learn to utilize GenAI more appropriately considering the characteristics of it and develop GenAI as a technology.

Future GenAI may change how we become creative and process information, and it remains fascinating to imagine how a future human can accelerate creativity. However, as educators we support learners to adopt and integrate AI tools into learning tasks. We need to collaboratively – educators and students together – increase our understanding of GenAI’s implications on creativity and divergent thinking. Future generations may think differently compared to us due to their continued usage of GenAI.

Returning to the question at the beginning of this article: will GenAI advance or hinder learners’ creativity and divergent thinking, can they still think outside the box or will they end up inside a GenAI’s box? As educators, we are convinced that these critical questions at least need to be thoroughly considered when students explore GenAI for their creative tasks as well as when we provide learners with bearings on what a continuous utilisation of such technology entails.

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