Brainstorming? Bosh. Creative freedom? Overrated. "Thinking outside the box?" Humbug, according to one study that found computers showed more creativity than people in dreaming up advertising.
Instead of batting around ideas in an atmosphere of tolerant experimentation, the computers worked alone and followed rules. A panel of judges found the computers' work was in the same league with the work of professional ad-makers' and far better than that of amateurs given total artistic freedom.
"The computer-generated ideas ranked significantly higher on a creativity scale than the ideas produced by the human subjects," wrote researchers Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky and Sorin Solomon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in an article in the journal Science.
This does not necessarily mean that computers are more creative than people, or that they will ever overtake humans, Mazursky said in an e-mail interview with Reuters.
"We are still quite far away from a possible conclusion that humans can be overtaken by computers, mainly because computers can not criticise their own ideas," Mazursky said. "However, our evidence suggests that computers can at least aid and support the creative process."
Contrary to popular wisdom that creativity thrives on unlimited freedom and unconventional thinking, Mazursky and his colleagues discovered that rules were essential to producing the ads the judges found creative.
Using a simple formula -- present in a small percentage of actual ads -- the computers came up with five ad ideas that judges decided were at least as good as advertisement concepts developed by humans.
These include an ad for Apple Computer in which the computer offered flowers to the user to show how user-friendly it was. Another showed a domed mosque with the texture of a tennis ball to promote a tennis tournament in Jerusalem.
Other computer-generated ideas included an image of a bullet-shaped car, suggesting the car's speed, and a cuckoo shaped like a jet plane popping out of a cuckoo clock to show an airline's punctuality.
The pattern used to generate all these ads was the same: Take a product and a characteristic of the product that needs to be promoted, then substitute another image that has that same characteristic.
The researchers found that 89 percent of award-winning ads match as few as six formulas, which they called "creativity templates," and 25 percent of those could follow what they called the replacement template -- the pattern the computer program used to create its ad ideas for this study.
A Web site linked to the researchers lets visitors try computer-generated ad-making.
For example, choosing cat food as the product and "classy" as the characteristic needing promotion, the site came up with dozens of ideas for advertisements, some worthwhile and some questionable.
There was the easy-to-envision can of cat food in a formal ballroom with a butler hovering nearby, as well as the cat food juxtaposed with an elegant lady or a London theatre box or a coronation.
The computer programme also generated an image of the cat food teamed with Count Dracula, as well as cat food and the fictional mob boss Don Corleone, with the entire Corleone family sitting in a booth at the opera.
"Our attempt is not to generate the complexity that is involved in routine creative tasks, but rather to examine an extreme case situation in which we utilized a rather simple procedure that illuminates how limited people are in creativity," Mazursky said by e-mail.
The notion of a formula to spark creative ideas is not new, according to David Farmer of the University of Michigan's executive education centre.
A low-tech alternative to the researchers' computer programme is the creativity wheel, a circular contraption that pairs items with qualities in need of promotion or emphasis, Farmer said by telephone.
The wheel is used "with a group of unassociated people (to) really try and invent a new way of focusing," Farmer said. "A lot of what is generated is total junk, but there may be some gems that are worth pursuing."
