Without variation on given ideas, there are no possibilities of scrutiny and selection of innovations. Therefore, the actual challenge becomes generating incidents with sufficiently high chances of selection.
The value of a zettelkasten is as a tool to actively force combinatorial creativity—the goal is to create accidents or collisions of ideas which might have a high chance of being discovered and selected for.
Wordcraft shined the most as a brainstorming partner and source of inspiration. Writers found it particularly useful for coming up with novel ideas and elaborating on them. AI-powered creative tools seem particularly well suited to sparking creativity and addressing the dreaded writer's block.
Just as using a text for writing generative annotations (having a conversation with a text) is a useful exercise for writers and thinkers, creative writers can stand to have similar textual creativity prompts.
Compare Wordcraft affordances with tools like Nabokov's card index (zettelkasten) method, Twyla Tharp's boxes, MadLibs, cadavre exquis, et al.
The key is to have some sort of creativity catalyst so that one isn't working in a vacuum or facing the dreaded blank page.
In addition to specific operations such as rewriting, there are also controls for elaboration and continutation. The user can even ask Wordcraft to perform arbitrary tasks, such as "describe the gold earring" or "tell me why the dog was trying to climb the tree", a control we call freeform prompting. And, because sometimes knowing what to ask is the hardest part, the user can ask Wordcraft to generate these freeform prompts and then use them to generate text. We've also integrated a chatbot feature into the app to enable unstructured conversation about the story being written. This way, Wordcraft becomes both an editor and creative partner for the writer, opening up new and exciting creative workflows.
The interface of Wordcraft sounds like some of that interface that note takers and thinkers in the tools for thought space would appreciate in their
Rather than pairing it with artificial intelligence and prompts for specific writing tasks, one might pair tools for though interfaces with specific thinking tasks related to elaboration and continuation. Examples of these might be gleaned from lists like Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
re: https://hypothes.is/a/HqT-lG1fEeqHX7fnzQAfGg
A zettelkasten provides a catalytic surface to which ideas in the "solution of life" can more easily adhere to speed their reaction with ideas you've already seen and collected.
Once combined via linking, further thinking and writing, they can be released as novel ideas for everyone to use.
In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".[24]
How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?
What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.
May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?
In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking.
I would put creativity into three buckets. If we define creativity as coming up with something novel or new for a purpose, then I think what AI systems are quite good at the moment is interpolation and extrapolation.
Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?
How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.