Brainstorming With GPT-3 (Introducing GenerateIdeas.ai)

[sorokinvj]

hey @alexg, great work! Though ideas themselves are not that good/impressive, the variety and overall quality of them are amazing!

I used to be a facilitator and I brainstormed with a lot of people. For several years I run a company that conducted creative and strategic sessions, so I know a couple of fun facts about creativity and how it works. I believe your AI is missing a secret sauce of every successful brainstorm - the power of combining ideas. I don’t know if this could be developed as part of the algorithm, but it is worth trying. You just need another AI or neural network that could generate creative questions.

Generally, people are not good at producing really interesting ideas within the first 10 minutes of the brainstorm, they do come up with obvious examples that are lying on the surface of participants’ consciousnesses - this is what your service is doing now (it matches a human behavior quite accurately). However, it is exactly the job of the facilitator or a coach - to come up with such questions that spark true creativity. There are a huge number of such methods, just look at HyperIsland toolbox or Miro brainstorming templates (like SCAMPER), but basically, they all have one goal - to shift people’s minds into a “paradox state”. It works like this: you ask people to do a mental exercise that might be quite absurd, for example, if people brainstorm a business idea, you might ask “combine uber, crypto mining, and red peppers”. At this moment participants’ brains are experiencing sort of a short circuit that would result either in a creativity spark or a burst of laughter (which is why brainstorms are usually full of fun).

I am not sure if GPT-3 could mimic human lateral thinking, but if you could somehow control an amount of non-sense in API requests I would rather try it. And maybe try to ask a very non-trivial question while generating 3rd, 4th etc mindmap layers.

[nunodonato]

I’m giving it a try right now. Looks great
Perhaps would be good to know in advance how credits are spent. Am I understanding correctly that 1 node = 1 credit?

[nunodonato]

the “explain” feature seems to not work so well, as most of the original node text is repeated and when the actual explanation starts the text is cut off

[alexg]

Thanks, yes that is how the credits are calculated:)

[alexg]

Thanks for letting me know, I will look into improving that feature

[alexg]

I will have to check, but this shouldn’t be the case as your idea should of-course be yours completely.

[alexg]

Can you let me know what type of content you were asking it to explain? Thanks again

[nunodonato]

Here’s an example

[nunodonato]

another example

[alexg]

Thanks for showing me that, I think the idea behind the ‘Explain’ feature is more about explaining concepts and factual answering like in this image. But a few people have made similar comments to yours so it’s obviously not clear enough how it should be used in the app at the moment.

[nunodonato]

Oh I see. I was more thinking of it as something to “expand” the previously generated idea

[alexg]

You can always click on ideas on the node to generate more, but I think an ‘Expand’ option could definitely be useful to breakdown an idea

[nunodonato]

Yeah, got it!
Are you keeping context (of the previous nodes) when generating new ideas/questions? I just got one (4th level node) that seemed to “ignore” the idea that was on the 2nd level (it’s parent’s parent)

[alexg]

Currently we only use the central node for context but are looking at going deeper and using more of the parent nodes as context

[jloganolson]

Nice. I was surprised by the dearth of gpt3 brainstorming apps - cool to see one pop up! Are there other folks in this space that you know of?

[alexg]

Haven’t really seen many where you can directly brainstorm with GPT3 like this one, most of the ones I’ve seen just list ideas such as https://ideasai.net/

[richmandan]

Hi Alex

I think you have done really great work with this app! It is an excellent use of GPT-3’s capabilities. It is easy to use, intuitive and well-designed. I love it!

I work with a number of start-up small business owners who would find this really useful. Do you have any plans to add a Team plan option for multiple users?

Did you use a no-code tool to build this app?

Danny

[alexg]

Hi Danny,

Thanks for the kind words!

GenerateIdeas is actually an extension of our main product https://www.ayoa.com/ which offers a host of collaboration and team management functionality. The team plans of Ayoa all get access to GenerateIdeas and are allocated tokens.

All the best,

Alex

[asabet]

Hey @alexg, interesting app, what’s user feedback been like? Have you tested performance in specific domains (ie for researchers, entrepreneurs, story writers, etc)? How do you deal with keeping the model up-to-date with recent events/discoveries? Base GPT3 models are only pre-trained on pre-2020 data atm, which can be essential for generating relevant ideas (ie remote work tools post-covid).

[sps]

This is supercool. I am going to give it a try in the morning. I am very curious - how many dev hour(s) did it take to build this?