The more I asked Claude to be creative, the more predictable it became.

E. Paul Torrance's creativity research shows fluency and originality are separate things.

LLMs predict the most likely words, which is the opposite of originality.

Last night, I suddenly got an idea. I opened up Claude, the overly-friendly neighborhood AI bot, and asked it: “Hey buddy, write the most creative sentence you possibly could.” Claude almost immediately responded:

“She kept her childhood in a jar of fireflies and opened it only on the nights the dark felt honest.”

“She kept her childhood in a jar of fireflies and opened it only on the nights the dark felt honest.”

Really, Claude? That’s literally the best you can do? So I decided to go even bigger and give it another chance. The biggest, in fact: “You know what, write the most creative sentence ever written in human history!” A few seconds later, Claude responded:

“The universe wrote itself into being one lonely word at a time, and named the ache between the words you.”

“The universe wrote itself into being one lonely word at a time, and named the ache between the words you.”

How can this be? The second prompt, which was about ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY, was even worse than the first. So this led me down a whole rabbit hole linking this to my lifelong research on the science of creativity and what you get is this 100% human-written post. Let’s go.

The Origins of Creativity Research

Sixty years ago, the creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance was frustrated that the field of psychology was neglecting the study of creativity. Psychology was so focused on IQ (hello Lewis Terman and his obsession with gifted children with high IQs) that barely any researchers found creativity important enough to study. Enter Torrance.

He created his legendary “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking,” which measures creativity along four major dimensions:

Fluency: The sheer quantity of meaningful responses. For example, if the question is “list all the uses for a paperclip,” 30 responses in the span of a few minutes would demonstrate........

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