Jose Oros

So our experiment had two steps, basically, or two main parts.

So the first part was getting actual results

musically trained people into our lab and getting them to create a melody.

So the first part was, OK, we're going to ask you to come in.

You're going to play this piano.

We give them 30 minutes to work on a melody.

And then we ask randomly to a set of these participants to access a tool that's called Urio, which is a text to music

So think about it as like a chat GPT, but instead of giving you text, you input a prompt like I want a song in the style of a rock anthem of the 80s and it's going to produce it in like 30 seconds.

And then what we're asking them to do is to use these outputs of this tool as ideas that they can then incorporate and create their melodies.

So that was like the first part of our experiment where we have around 140 people come into our lab, create the melodies.

Some of them were assisted by the AI.

And then once we have the melodies, then we can move forward to that next step that is asking people, what do you think about it?

And specifically, how creative you think this is.

So interestingly enough, and we came in like, as I mentioned before, we thought that this is going to be something where just having access to more exemplars would definitely lead to an increase in creativity.

But we find the opposite.

So we don't find anything.

We don't find any increase in creativity.

We actually find that the melodies that were created under this treatment condition with the aid of Udio

actually lead to a small drop in the creativity ratings for those musicians that use the AI.

Yes, that's a very tough question, especially when you're studying something like creativity, right?