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How to Master AI Powered Creativity in Just 13 Minutes | Jeremy Utley

EO13:19Added Aug 31, 2026

Jeremy Utley, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, explains why most people are not fully utilizing AI’s creative potential. Why is that? He explains that it lies in how we approach AI. He said a simple mindset shift could be what you've been missing in the AI revolution.

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Intro

  2. 00:00I've always been jealous of Winston Churchill.
  3. 00:02There's a quote, by the way.
  4. 00:04The history of innovation is the bed, the bus and the bathtub.
  5. 00:08It's always these moments when we're not really thinking about work
  6. 00:11or we're kind of doing something else that good ideas come to us.
  7. 00:15Winston Churchill,
  8. 00:16He's sitting in the bathtub, and he's dictating a national address
  9. 00:20to his assistant who's in the other room.
  10. 00:22She's saying, "distinguished ladies and gentlemen"
  11. 00:25"Don't call them distinguished"
  12. 00:27"They're not"
  13. 00:28This is the Gary Oldman version. "They're not distinguished."
  14. 00:31You know, "Dear ladies and gentlemen, we have gathered together."
  15. 00:35"Get to the point!"
  16. 00:37and I'm watching this going
  17. 00:39I would give anything to have an assistant who understood my context and my voice and
  18. 00:45my intent well enough that I could sit in the bath and they could write my speech.
  19. 00:50Now, the poorest villager in Palo Alto
  20. 00:54can have what only Winston Churchill
  21. 00:57used to have,
  22. 00:58which is an assistant that has my context and my voice and my intent available to me
  23. 01:04so that when I'm in the bathtub, I can be dictating my address.
  24. 01:08That is absolutely technically possible today.
  25. 01:12Exploring Human Agency in the age of AI
  26. 01:15Exploring Human Agency in the age of AI : Uncoded
  27. 01:18Ep.1 How to Become a Better Collaborator with AI
  28. 01:20I'm Jeremy Utley, I'm an adjunct professor of creativity
  29. 01:24and AI at Stanford University.

  30. Who is Jeremy Utley?

  31. 01:26I've been teaching at Stanford for the last 15 years
  32. 01:29at the intersection of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and now
  33. 01:33increasingly, artificial intelligence.
  34. 01:35The topic that I'm most focused on right now is helping non-technical professionals
  35. 01:41learn to be good collaborators to or with generative AI.
  36. 01:46And then two years ago,
  37. 01:47myself and my partner at the time, Perry Klebahn, wrote a book called
  38. 01:51Idea Flow, which was the canonical book on idea generation and prototyping.
  39. 01:56So super proud of that.
  40. 01:58It was the culmination of a dozen years of leading executive programs
  41. 02:02and the leadership program and the entrepreneurship program at Stanford.
  42. 02:06And one month after our book came out, ChatGPT came out.
  43. 02:11To me, the fact that I wrote the canonical book on Idea generation just prior to AI
  44. 02:18is like writing the best book on retail just before the internet.
  45. 02:23AI is a tool to dramatically augment and amplify our creativity.
  46. 02:28And the truth is, I didn't know a lot about it when the book came out.
  47. 02:31So one month after my book came out, instead of going on a world book tour,
  48. 02:36I strapped myself back into the front row as a student and said,
  49. 02:41I need to be learning about this transformative new technology.
  50. 02:44So I started taking classes. I started conducting research.
  51. 02:47I started working with and studying teams inside of organizations, using the tool
  52. 02:52to understand the simple question,
  53. 02:55how does generative AI impact the individual and the team and the
  54. 03:00organization's ability to solve problems?
  55. 03:04Chapter1. Don't Ask AI, Let It Ask You

  56. Do not Ask AI, Let It Ask You

  57. 03:06You can give an AI a prompt, for example.
  58. 03:09How should I answer this question?
  59. 03:12Or you could give an AI the question
  60. 03:15I want to ask how I should answer this question.
  61. 03:18What's the best way of framing that question to an AI?
  62. 03:22So you see what I did there?
  63. 03:24I asked AI for how to ask I my question,
  64. 03:28but you can use AI to use AI, which is you couldn't use Excel to use Excel.
  65. 03:33PowerPoint can't teach you how to use PowerPoint.
  66. 03:35Email can't teach you how to use email.
  67. 03:37AI strangely can teach you how to use itself if you think to ask.
  68. 03:41Go to your language model of choice and just say the following.
  69. 03:45Hey, you're an AI expert.
  70. 03:48I would love your help and a consultation with you to help me figure out
  71. 03:53where I can best leverage AI in my life.
  72. 03:56As an AI expert, would you please ask me questions one question at a time,

  73. The 10X Creativity Hack

  74. 04:01until you have enough context about my workflows and responsibilities and KPIs
  75. 04:05and and objectives that you could
  76. 04:07make two obvious recommendations and two non-obvious recommendations
  77. 04:12for how AI could leverage AI in my work.
  78. 04:15you will have one of the most enlightening and illuminating conversations you've ever had,
  79. 04:20and it's all because of AI's ability to evaluate its own work.
  80. 04:24What I've seen is non-technical employees are able to do incredible things.
  81. 04:28Here's one example.
  82. 04:29The National Park Service called me and asked me if I would
  83. 04:33conduct a training program for a bunch of backcountry rangers,
  84. 04:37so they gathered a group of about 60 backcountry rangers and facilities managers
  85. 04:42into a training session,
  86. 04:43and I spent a couple of hours over zoom teaching folks the basics of collaborating with AI.
  87. 04:49One of the people in that session was a gentleman named Adam Rymer,
  88. 04:53who works at Glen Canyon National Park.
  89. 04:55And one of the things I say is you should focus on parts of your work that you dread.
  90. 05:00Parts of your work that you don't enjoy.
  91. 05:03"Ah, I have to do this again."
  92. 05:05And Adam said, if I have to replace the carpet tiles in the lodge.
  93. 05:09I have to fill out all this paperwork.
  94. 05:10And so to replace a carpet tile will sometimes take 2 or 3 days of paperwork.
  95. 05:15Then he thought, could AI help me write that paperwork?
  96. 05:18And in 45 minutes, he built a tool with natural language
  97. 05:23that saves him two days of work.
  98. 05:26Every day he makes a statement of work and then listen to this.
  99. 05:30Someone got access to that tool and shared it across the other parks.
  100. 05:35There's about 430 parks in the service.
  101. 05:38The National Park Service is estimating that the tool that Adam built in 45 minutes
  102. 05:42is going to save the service 7000 days of human labor this year.
  103. 05:48That's the kind of impact that normal professionals can have, even without
  104. 05:55any technical ability, if only they're given very basic foundational training.
  105. 06:02Chapter2. Do not Use AI, Treat It as a Teammate

  106. I Don't USE AI

  107. 06:04People are wanting to learn AI and how it can be transformative for their business,
  108. 06:08but they don't have the basic language.
  109. 06:11And so while lots of organizations are asking me how can we work with AI
  110. 06:15to transform our business?
  111. 06:16Where I have to start with them is how do you work with AI?
  112. 06:20The research I'm familiar with suggests that while on the one hand,
  113. 06:23AI makes people 25% faster and 12% more work and 40% better quality,
  114. 06:29it's also true that less than 10% of working professionals
  115. 06:33are deriving meaningful productivity gains from collaboration with AI.
  116. 06:37To me, there's this enormous gap. I call it the realization gap.
  117. 06:42We conducted studies both in Europe and in the United States.
  118. 06:45And what we found is, surprisingly, AI didn't help most people be more creative.

  119. Why Do Some People Produce More Creative Results Using the Same AI Tools?

  120. 06:51In fact, in many cases, the people that we studied, AI made them less creative.
  121. 06:56And as we started digging into the research,
  122. 06:58we were surprised and looked at the data.
  123. 07:00We were confused because you think AI should make people
  124. 07:04more creative, not less.
  125. 07:05And we studied the underperformers and then we studied the Outperformers.
  126. 07:10And what we found is the Outperformers had a fundamentally different orientation
  127. 07:15towards AI than the underperformers did, whereas the underperformers
  128. 07:21treated AI like a tool.
  129. 07:23The outperformers treated AI like a teammate,
  130. 07:28and shifting your orientation from tool to teammate changes everything
  131. 07:33about the kinds of outcomes that you can achieve
  132. 07:36working with generative AI. A simple example is what do you do
  133. 07:40when it gives you mediocre results?
  134. 07:43If it's a tool, you get a mediocre result and then maybe you improve it.
  135. 07:48Or maybe you say, it's no good at doing that.
  136. 07:51If it's a teammate who's giving you a mediocre result,
  137. 07:54think about the last teammate who gave you work product that wasn't sufficient.
  138. 07:58You gave them feedback.
  139. 07:59You gave them coaching, you gave them mentorship, you helped them improve it.
  140. 08:04And so what we found is that people who treat AI like a teammate, coach it
  141. 08:08and give it feedback and importantly, get it to ask them questions.
  142. 08:13The fundamental orientation a lot of people take towards AI
  143. 08:16is I'm the question asker.
  144. 08:18AI is the answer giver.
  145. 08:20But if you think about AI like a teammate, you say, hey, what are ten questions

  146. Treat AI As a Teammate

  147. 08:25I should ask about this?
  148. 08:26Or what do you need to know from me in order to get the best response?
  149. 08:31So things, for example, like you have a difficult conversation
  150. 08:34coming up with a coworker.
  151. 08:36Did you know you could leverage a large language model
  152. 08:38to roleplay that conversation?
  153. 08:41You can get an AI to interview you about your conversation partner,
  154. 08:45and then construct a psychological profile of your conversation partner,
  155. 08:49and then play the role of your conversation partner in a roleplay,
  156. 08:53and then give you feedback from the perspective of your conversation partner
  157. 08:57on how you approach the conversation.
  158. 08:59That's something you can do today, and there are many things like that.
  159. 09:03I call them drills,
  160. 09:04but there are many things like that where if someone will just shift
  161. 09:08their consideration set of what
  162. 09:11are the things I can do with AI. They end up discovering applications
  163. 09:16that I've never even dreamed of.
  164. 09:17I've been doing this stuff for two years, and my students are regularly
  165. 09:21coming to me with use cases I've never imagined that landed them in a destination
  166. 09:26I could have never predicted,
  167. 09:27and they could never have predicted.

  168. Inspiration is a Discipline

  169. 09:30For me, I never thought about myself as a creative individual.
  170. 09:33Now, I fully and fundamentally believe every single human being
  171. 09:38has innate creative capacity.
  172. 09:40Every single one of us.
  173. 09:41What the D.school has helped me do is unlock others.
  174. 09:45Everyone has this latent creative capacity.
  175. 09:48Once I was teaching a class with a hip hop artist named Lecrae.
  176. 09:52He's a multi-time Grammy Award winning artist, and he and I are teaching a class
  177. 09:56to graduate students at Stanford, and we're giving them the assignment.
  178. 09:59You've got to go get inspiration in the world.
  179. 10:01And what I can see is it's like looking at myself in the mirror ten years ago,
  180. 10:05because all of the business school students
  181. 10:06in the class are going, "inspiration?"
  182. 10:10And I just felt Lecrae is clearly the The creative legend in the room.
  183. 10:15I said, Lecrae, what do you think about inspiration?
  184. 10:18And of course, as only a hip hop artist could do, he dropped a bar.
  185. 10:21He said, inspiration is a discipline.
  186. 10:24And I realized in that moment, for these students,
  187. 10:27it's not even on their radar as a tool, let alone a routine part of their life.
  188. 10:33But the most wildly creative individuals I know are disciplined about cultivating
  189. 10:39the inputs to their thinking, because they know it affects
  190. 10:41the outputs of their thinking.
  191. 10:43And so, even in regards to AI, I push people.
  192. 10:47What is the inspiration you're bringing to the model?
  193. 10:49Everybody has the same access to the same ChatGPT.
  194. 10:53How do I get a different output than you do?
  195. 10:55It's because of what I bring to the model. And what do I bring to the model?
  196. 10:59Certainly I bring technique, but I also bring my experience.
  197. 11:03I bring my perspective.
  198. 11:04I bring all the inspiration I've gleaned from the world.
  199. 11:07That's what gets a user a differential output from a model.
  200. 11:11Chapter3. How to Go Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Ideas
  201. 11:14A seventh grader in Ohio who I don't even know what her name is,

  202. The Definition of Creativity in the Age of AI

  203. 11:18but her teacher asked, what is creativity?
  204. 11:20And she put a post-it note up on the board that says,
  205. 11:22Creativity is doing more
  206. 11:24than the first thing you think of.
  207. 11:27And that's my favorite definition, because it speaks to a profound
  208. 11:31cognitive bias that we hold.
  209. 11:33It's been called functional fixedness. It's been called the Einstellung effect.
  210. 11:37But the basic premise is humans tend to fixate on an early solution
  211. 11:44and be satisfied.
  212. 11:45Herbert Simon called it satisficing, but it's the idea that if we get
  213. 11:49to good enough, it's enough.
  214. 11:51And that's why I love that seventh graders definition.
  215. 11:53Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.
  216. 11:56It's pushing past. Good enough.
  217. 11:59Is the definition of creativity changing in the age of AI?
  218. 12:03I don't think so.
  219. 12:04The reality is, with AI, it's now easier than ever to get good enough.
  220. 12:10If your goal is world class, if your goal is exceptional, then what you
  221. 12:14want to be prompting for is actually volume and variation, and that takes time.
  222. 12:20It takes time to not only read through it, but to sort it and to process it.
  223. 12:25But fundamentally, the definition of creativity doesn't change in the age of AI.
  224. 12:30It's just that the human's ability or inability to arrive at a creative state
  225. 12:35is affected not only by the technology,
  226. 12:38but also by their stated or unstated objectives in collaborating with it.
  227. 12:45Creators don't need to be afraid of AI. Creators need to dive in.
  228. 12:49They need to lean in.
  229. 12:50Creators are about to be unleashed in a way they've never been unleashed before.
  230. 12:55The only correct answer to the question how do you use AI?
  231. 12:59Is I don't. I don't use AI. I work with it.
  232. 13:04When you start working with AI, it will change everything.