Could We Ever…See Creativity Become Dangerous?

[Ricardo] We recording? Okay. Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the….[mumbles]

[Danyelle] Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the UT Dallas CometCast network.

[Ricardo] Could We Ever shines a light on our experts and ask them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[Jeff Goldblum] Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

[Ricardo] You might recognize that quote by actor Jeff Goldblum in the 90s classic “Jurassic Park.” It presents an interesting thought about the negative side of creativity. So we wanted to know, could we ever see creativity become dangerous?

[Danyelle] To learn more on creativity we met with Dr. Magdalena Grohman, who is the associate director of the Center for Values here at UT Dallas. Magda also teaches a class on the psychology of creativity. Her research focuses on the cognitive aspects of creative thinking and creative problem solving. So first we wanted to ask Magda the basics. What makes something creative?

[Magda] I can give you a definition but there is a plethora of definitions of creativity within psychology. It depends on what people look at, what they research, and some definitions are very broad and fuzzy and you know the people in natural science will cringe at them. And some definitions are very fine and well and and the defined phenomenon really well. So I can give you one of the definitions. So most often people look at creativity from two perspectives. So this will be either from your individual perspective — so what is going on in your mind and what the response means in reference to your behavioral repertoire — and you can look at creativity from social perspective. So this is where others people’s judgment is necessary to, to say or to appraise whatever you, your idea is. Right? So from the individual perspective I think that the most frequently used definition is that creativity is the process of combining ideas in a kind of unexpected way and you express that idea somehow. Right? So it’s not sitting in your head. It’s somehow expressed on the paper, in your craft, whatever you do, whatever you like to do. Now the social perspective on creativity would say that creativity is a combination of someone’s abilities and skills and the process, the creative process and the environment in which creativity happens and that results in a product. In a tangible product that is then appraised or valued by culture or by a group of experts, by the whole society, culture and so on and so forth. So if I’ve never came up with an idea that a cup could be used to throw at someone because I’ve always thought that that cup is there to hold things — whether liquid or not — and I for the first time in my life I’ve given that response that I can throw it at someone, within my repertoire this will be very infrequent type of response and therefore I could consider it creative. If I am in a sample of 50 people and every other person at some point says that the cup can be used to throw at people then my response will be very infrequent and therefore not creative. Okay. So the way creativity of products or ideas is looked at is from the standpoint of how frequent those ideas are; how novel — so what is the aspect of unexpectedness and surprise and novelty in them — and also how others value that product.

[Ricardo] Okay. Is there any, an example so something that is creative that we wouldn’t immediately think that that was creative? Is there ways that we see creativity in everyday life that we don’t really–

[Danyelle] recognize as creativity.

[Magda] Well if you think about any given everyday life object that you’ve been taking for granted, at some point someone invented it.

[Ricardo] Mmm-hmm.

[Magda] But right now, because we’ve been using it for such a long time, we take it for granted. We don’t really notice its ingenuity anymore. So like a pencil. At some point people got tired with using the, what you call it, that feather.

[Danyelle] Mmm-hmm. Quill.

[Ricardo] Quill. [laughing]

[Magda] At some point people thought if you use ink you cannot correct your mistake. Right? So maybe there could be something else

[Ricardo] Yeah.

[Magda] Right? Something that I can erase easily. So at some point it was ingenious and right now we take it for granted and that’s pretty much with every single everyday object. And what is really more interesting is that if you ask people about who the most creative person was, or who they think the most creative person is, was, very often they would point at people who presented those or introduced very kind of big, big revolutionary ideas. Right? So Einstein comes to mind right away, and other people in the arts, like Picasso. So we have, like, culturally ingrained in our mind who that creative person, that creative genius, if you will, but if you think about everyday life objects, which were revolutionary at the time, you don’t remember who invented them.

[Ricardo] Mmm-hmm.

[Danyelle] That’s sad. I mean there were so many of them. Right? I mean, if you look around. So we just don’t. Right? We very quickly we adapted those, those devices and objects and we just used them and we never think twice about who invented them.

[Ricardo] What a downer. [all laughing]

[Danyelle] What are some other implications — some negative implications — with creativity outside of tech, specifically?

[Magda] So it’s an interesting thing. Right? Because we, culturally, we are so used to thinking about creativity in terms of benevolent values. Right? So the positive values — and especially in the 50s with the rise of humanistic psychology where creativity was thought to be the highest level of self-actualization, this is where really we started thinking about it in very very positive terms — but there the line between benevolent creativity and malevolent creativity is really a fine one.

[Ricardo] Just breaking in here for a moment to say that malevolent is defined as having, showing or arising from intense, often vicious ill-will, spite or hatred.

[Danyelle] Benevolent is defined as organized for the purpose of doing good.

[Magda] So people distinguish two types of this, quote unquote, bad creativity. Right? So they, they talk about malevolent creativity and they talk about negative creativity. So negative creativity is this gray area really. A lie to get yourself out of a trouble could be an instance of negative creativity. You are not harming anyone with your little lie, you are getting yourself out of trouble, but still this is a kind of, a — in our cultural system — a deviant behavior that we are not necessarily accept. If you think about creative process the major ability that gets you through it, or one of the major abilities, is divergent thinking. And what is divergent thinking? Its producing an answer, an idea, that is different from average output.

[Danyelle] For those of you who don’t know what divergent means, it means developing in different directions. And so divergent thinking opens your mind up in all different directions.

[Magda] So if you forgot your homework or whatever and you say that you, you are honest and you say that you forgot it for such-and-such reason, you are producing an average, an expected answer. But if you are lying yourself out of the situation and you are using very believable scenarios such that people will believe you, why you don’t have that homework or that you know project or whatever, then you are exhibiting a creative behavior in a sense. Whether it’s socially accepted or not it’s another question. Like I said, negative creativity is when people are displaying that or showcasing that deviant behavior, responses but they don’t have intention to harm anyone. Okay? Or they don’t have the intention for the idea or product or whatever to be harmful. Now malevolent creativity is doing all that but with the intention of harming. If you watch any type of crime story where we have a antihero you can see that, that the intention is there to harm. I’m using all my wits to get as much, as creative to, to deal with my situations but in the end it is to steal, it is to manipulate, it is to harm.

[Danyelle] How do we see malevolent creativity crop up in our everyday lives and also in tech industries?

[Magda] So in tech industry, I mean one example that comes to mind — Enron was one example. The 2008 crash in the housing market.

[Ricardo] Okay, so for those of us who were still sucking their thumbs at the time, Enron was an energy trading company that collapsed after a massive accounting fraud scheme was revealed. Its 2001 bankruptcy filing was the largest in American history at the time. Estimated losses totaled about $74 billion. The financial crisis of 2008 created the biggest disruption to the US housing markets since the Great Depression. The expansion of mortgages to high-risk borrowers coupled with the rising house prices contributed to a period of turmoil in financial markets that lasted from 2007 to 2010.

[Magda] So these are huge examples. Right? Where people knew they were manipulating the system for the gains and they were doing it in a very creative way. And even when you think about Enron, the phrase “creative accounting” comes from that time. Right? So they were using unexpected ways of dealing with the situation for their own personal gain. So that in the, in the social setting and a setting of corporation, this type of behavior is not really accepted. Right? Because you shouldn’t be there. You shouldn’t trick the system. You shouldn’t manipulate the system. You shouldn’t trick people into getting a loan if they don’t have the means to pay it off for your own gain in the end. So these are like huge, huge examples of this type of malevolent creativity. In daily life we all know people or we’ve had experience with the people who will manipulate us with our feelings, with our emotions, with the way we think, to gain whatever they need to gain. And this is something different than just lying yourself out of the an uncomfortable situation. Right? Because this is a behavior that in the end hurts hurts you and not them. And they typically have the intention to, to harm. The malevolent creators, some people talk that such individuals have certain type of personality profile that creates this kind of a syndrome, a whole syndrome of behaviors, and coupled with really great divergent thinking skills that can lead to this malevolent.

[Ricardo] Is there any way to combat that?

[Magda] I think we can. We can with emphasis on civic morality and this is again what Don Howard was talking about in his lecture.

[Ricardo] The speaker Magda is referring to is Dr. Don Howard of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values at the University of Notre Dame. He was giving a presentation on big data, AI and civic virtue. She’ll mention him again later.

[Magda] If we create the environment where, where people are freely, can freely exercise civic moral engagement, it’s okay to do things for others and not for your own personal gain, when it’s okay to think through a project or a design even if we are, we not meet the deadline but in the end we are not killing absent minded pedestrians. He also mentioned one philosophy that actually proposed a framework for this kind of moral engagement within corporations. To a degree malevolent creativity is combated, right, because most of the people who commit those crimes —

[Ricardo] Yeah.

[Magda] — they end up in the hands of the justice system. Right?

[Ricardo] They’re punished, yeah.

[Danyelle] Is there any way to positively channel malevolent behavior or, event what you were talking about, the lighter deviant behavior in more positive ways?

[Magda] Of course. So let’s say a child shows the tendency to tell lies but those lies have to do with creating believable scenarios. So that child has to imagine what you think the scenarios could be and deviate from that. So it’s a, it’s an amazing skill in and of itself. I mean, not lying but just the fact that you imagine what someone else can think and feel and create a very believable — for that person — scenario. Right? So one way to to sort of channel it in a correct way would be to suggest to such a child to use the imagination to create multiple universes or imaginary words and work on their divergent thinking skills and just, you know, kind of channel each towards a more positive outcome. Not just the outcome that will help him or her to avoid certain situation but actually create something that could be the source of pride and sort of sharing with others and, and so on. The tricky part is that sometimes what society perceives as negative creativity a decade later is perceived by us as an insight of a genius, as something that was so deviant that we couldn’t really embrace it at the moment but later on becomes the either inspiration for greater discoveries or technological achievements. Right? So it’s really a fine line between, I think, negative creativity, which is again the one that kind of clashes with social norms but doesn’t harm anyone. Right? There is no intention to harm so this, this, I mean, if you think about great creators oftentimes whatever ideas or things that were working on would be that type of behavior. It wouldn’t be socially accepted.

[Danyelle] So like how, how is there time for someone to consider multiple implications of a problem in this rapidly changing tech industry world?

[Magda] So what I said was that the, the pressure for some reasons that the tech industry thinks in terms that everything needs to be done right away. Right? So it’s not that we are solving yesterday’s problems. We are still looking very much into the future. People are not given enough time in the design process to, during those very early stages of design, to think about different types of scenarios. Okay, so let me, let me explain it this way. There are many creative problem-solving or design thinking models out there. Most of them claim that they are human centered, that they want to include the user in the process of design, but what happens, reality is such that the engineers and designers are very pushed very early on in the process to create prototypes. So there isn’t much space for them to think about different types of scenarios or moral scenarios or ethical scenarios that would involve their design and what the users do with the design. I mean, they– I don’t think there is an easy solution to this. Right? And what we can do as educators is trying to teach engineering students or design students to take a lot of time during this very phase of the process and not to rush through it.

[Ricardo] Do companies have like somebody in place usually to take care of this?

[Magda] So corporations often hire so-called ombudsmen, so people who do take care of ethical issues, that’s my understanding. Typically those people are not involved in the process of design. They are only involved in if something serious surfaces and the legality of it needs to be checked or, or some other ethical aspects needs to be checked. To give you an example for people who work on different types of GPS trackers. They collect the data. They need to store the data. Sometimes they use the broadband, different type of broadbands to, to get that data and sometimes the tracker’s in the car, in the vehicle and it’s synchronized with you opening, with you opening the car with your remote key. So that signal from the key is, I think, is using one of those broad bands. Right? So you as a designer you need to make sure that you use the correct broadband such that you don’t interfere with other people’s–

[Ricardo] Frequency, signal.

[Magda] –frequency. Right? So you have to check it with FCC. Right? So there might be an issue of privacy, for example, of privacy violation or using other types of broadband frequencies. So this is where such ombudsmen may be helpful and this is typically, sadly, when they are often asked questions. But my understanding is that they are not necessarily involved in the projects. Dr. Howard in, in his presentation talked about one instance, one corporation, IBM, who actually specifically hired ethics expert and that person’s task is to kind of think broadly about where the company is going, the choices they make.

[Danyelle] Do you think if companies and industries had some sort of, like, review board on the front end of, before the prototype ever even gets made, when the idea first comes up — do you think that we could see that change the implications we have from technology? Like do you think we could see, like, a positive change or do you think it’s just still really difficult to foresee?

[Magda] Like some people would suggest similar boards as their research, the IRB boards, in, in companies that look through the projects that ask questions that, you know, provoke type of thinking. But I am not sure to what degree this could be implemented in corporations. But this is, this is an issue and we see that like going back to the students. Right? That they somehow learn that this is the appropriate behavior or expected behavior is to work through project fast, to meet the deadline, to make the prototype fast, and if something gets a mess during the process, well.

[Ricardo] Yeah. So there should be more precautionary steps taken.

[Magda] Yeah.

[Ricardo] Instead of just looking at in hindsight.

[Magda] Yes. If you look at the the models of creative process in psychology, most of the researchers would emphasize not this, not the face of the process — where you actually brainstorm ideas or even select them and based on those selections you make your prototypes or whatever that is you are working on — but they focus on or they emphasize the, the problem-finding stage of creative process. And this is the process where not only questions about what it is you want needs to be asked, but those broader questions that suggest certain implications, certain ethical and moral implications.

[Danyelle] And do you think ethical decision-making will become more important in the future?

[Magda] I think so. I’m I’m pretty convinced that that will be the case, especially with the growing application of artificial intelligence. So the kind of a backbone of artificial intelligence is a bunch of algorithms that are fed to the, to the network. Right? And that network learns certain types of behaviors. So first you have to think what type of data you are feeding. Is my data biased? Is my data balanced? Because that the machine is not going to conjure up a behavior that doesn’t have its root within that learning set, that, the learning data. Right? So you have to definitely think about that. And also you have to think what the user is going to do. What kind of data user is going to feed into your machine. So think Siri. Or, and I don’t know how long we have Siri how long…

[Danyelle laughing] She’s always been here.

[Ricardo] We looked it up. Siri, the virtual assistant, first launched in early 2010.

[Magda] Has been around but right now because people are constantly responding to it — in sometimes in an okay way, sometimes in this really stupid way — it had gradually learned to respond. Right? Maybe engineers fed into the system some types of responses. But there was a case I think with Microsoft and their device.

[Ricardo] Cortana.

[Magda] Yes, Cortana.

[Ricardo] Yeeaahhh.

[Magda] Where, what the user started feeding very negative input to Cortana to see how, what the response would be. And the system learned to behave in this negative type of way. Right? So, so right now it gets the technological development, it goes into the area that it really requires a careful thought of what is the intention of the device. What possibly people could be doing with the device. Right? And what am I feeding the device or the types of algorithm or what types of data are fed into the algorithm. So, so definitely there is already and there will be a great need for this type of reflection. The question is, would the be a time factored in the design to to really take advantage of it.

[Ricardo] I think AI is one of those topics that people do really think about — at least in the public — that really take time to ask, well, what if, you know, what if they take over? What if they become bad? You know?

[Magda] Right. So the public definitely has those responses. Right? Would the intelligence have a life on its own and, and be competing with us in a way or robots, or whatever? Right? But this is on a, on a kind of greater level, right? But kind of on it on a day to day basis designers and engineers needs to be very careful and the first step is what kind of data I’m feeding into algorithm. Right? So like facial recognition — for years they didn’t realize that the the algorithm for facial recognition was trained on white males.

[Ricardo] Hmm.

[Magda] So and, and the cameras were calibrated for that so when a person with darker skin color would be in front of such camera the system couldn’t really recognize the face then. There’s many examples like that. Right? That the data that we feed into algorithms. into AI, is not really thought through and that that creates biases and other problems.

[Danyelle] Hey friends. We just wanted to give you some quick background here. According to a 2018 New York Times article, when it comes to facial recognition technology the software is right 99% of the time when the person in the photo is a white man. But the darker the skin the more errors we see, up to nearly 35% for images of darker-skinned women. This is according to a study that measured how the technology works on people of different races and genders.

[Danyelle] I think that goes back to your point earlier about needing to bring that up in the educational realm.

[Magda] Yes, oh yeah, definitely so. Definitely so. So the Center is really invested into creating a space or a program for, for design and engineering students where they can engage in this kind of ethical reflection and decision-making

[Danyelle] So can you tell us a little bit about how you got into creative psych?

[Magda] Oh, gosh. It was so long ago. There is one, what we like to call in psychology “crystallizing experience” for me, when it comes to psychology and creativity. So when I was growing up and I was in elementary school and then high school I really liked the arts. But the feedback I was getting from the teachers was a lot of negative feedback.

[Danyelle] That’s harsh.

[Magda] I was very discouraged to do  anything of it or showcase it during the classes. And then — I think it was my sophomore year in high school — where there was a group of researchers from the University from Krakov invited to a high school and they were doing creative thinking sessions with the students. And they began by giving us divergent thinking tests and all of us saw that at first our responses were mediocre, and, you know, myself included. Like kind of, not mediocre in the sense of average type of response. I think it was at some kind of drawing test, if I remember. And then for the following few days they were giving us very intensive workshops on creative thinking and then afterwards they gave us similar tests again. And the students involved in those sessions saw that tremendous difference between our kind of inhibited types of responses, average types of responses, and then we– as if something was unlocked by those workshops. And this is how I got really interested in the notion of creativity and psychology. So I knew at that point that this will be something I would like to learn more about.

[Danyelle] I didn’t realize you had been interested in the creative aspect of psychology from that young of an age with what you do in the Center for Values. What interests you about the topic of ethical decision making?

[Magda] Precisely how it gets intertwined with the design process and with creative thinking process. So it’s kind of the the junction between moral judgment and ethical judgment. So thinking about whether whatever I’m working on is going to benefit people and how others will use it. Would it–Would it benefit them? Would they behave according to the instructions? Or not? Right? So, so this interests me. Where, in what way can we help people think this way? And, and kind of not focus on the technicalities because the design is not about technicality. It’s not about just fulfilling the need that the user has but it’s, it’s broader. Right?

[Danyelle] Interesting. Ok, so then tell us a little bit about what you do for this in the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology here on campus?

[Magda] So I’m involved like in the nitty-gritty daily operations of the center as an administrator but I’m also involved in research. And one really interesting line of research we have done involved ethical decision making in engineering. So we observed students, how they were discussing or going about their senior design projects. We were giving them some prompts to discuss in relationship to the project. So, for example, we would ask okay, so do you think the project you work on have any kind of consequences or implications for ordinary people? Right? So we wanted them to think about ethics in broader sense in terms of social responsibility and not just the engineering conduct or professional conduct. And we noticed that the students were kind of very quickly shifting their focus from discussing those broader ethical issues to focus on very technical aspects of the projects. And they would hardly ever use their ideas that they discuss in terms of their social responsibility and include them in their final work. So in case of one group, if I remember correctly, they were designing this, um, the robot that would operate cannon that shoots off the t-shirts. And during the discussion session they were discussing the, the issues pertaining to that robot with philosophy students. They were thinking, oh we should have this to make sure it’s safe, this to make sure that the interface works between the operator and the robot. And so they would list a lot of different things, a lot of different ideas but then because they become so focused on the technical aspects of the project, they kind of forgot about those ideas so they never included them.

[Danyelle] Hmmmm.

[Magda] So that got me to think about the issue of design — so called the design thinking or creative process or creative problem-solving — and the the factors that prevent us from going broad. Okay? So actually the speaker that we had that the center hosted at the beginning of March was touching on that problem as well. And he said that when it comes to technology and design the progress is not the problem. But the problem is that all that design needed to be done yesterday.

[Danyelle] Mm-hmm

[Magda] Which doesn’t allow engineers and designers to really think and imagine different types of scenarios that involve moral and ethical judgment. And he gave an example of Tesla autonomous vehicle. There was an incident in which the person was run over and killed.

[Ricardo] I think I remember this story, yeah.

[Ricardo, aside] A little bit on the accident Magda is referring to. According to New York Times a person was struck and killed in March 2018 by an autonomous car operated by Uber in Tempe, Arizona. It was believed to be the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving technology. The car was in autonomous mode when it struck them. Portions of the dashboard camera released by police showed that the safety driver was clearly distracted and looking down from the road. Their hands were not hovering over the steering wheel as instructed, and as the article states, this accident serves as a reminder that self-driving technology is still in experimental stage and governments are trying to figure out a way to regulate it.

[Magda] The problem was that they couldn’t foresee certain behaviors on the user’s part. Right? This person who was crossing the street was like looking at their cell phone or something. They were not paying attention to what was going on on the street. Right? So the typical, like, designers’ answer to that situation is, it’s not, it’s not our fault. It’s the user. But because of the artificial intelligence or the technologies based on artificial intelligence or the meaning “autonomous vehicles” and other things I think the the kind of space in which we have to make moral judgment became blurry. So it’s not longer my design — I’m done and I don’t take any responsibility what the user does. I think it all gets intertwined and now the engineers and designers need to actually imagine different types of scenarios. Different types of behaviors. Different types users. And make judgment with which of those users will be deviant and which one will be appropriate. And they need to imagine the solutions or the fixes in case the behavior is deviant. Right? Depending on what side you are on.

[Danyelle] Mm-mm.

[Ricardo] Yeah.

[Danyelle] So. Dr. Grohman. Do you think we could ever see creativity become dangerous?

[Magda, exaggerating] Like I was saying! [all laugh]

[Magda] There are products out there, there are people out there who’ve been engaging in that type of creativity for ages. So it’s not something new, it’s just that as a society, as a culture we put more emphasis and we pay attention to the benevolent aspects of creativity so we don’t really see that similar types of processes are going on the other, on the dark side.

[Danyelle] So Magda left us with one final nugget of advice.

[Magda] Take your time when you’re designing things and when you’re working on your ideas and never rush through the phase, the initial phase, that has to do with problem finding or asking questions about what it is that you’re working on. Never rush that phase. Good engineers, good designers devote around 80% of their time to that phase. So don’t rush, and think broadly.

[Danyelle] All right, well, thank you for coming on this. It’s been very enlightening.

[Ricardo] Yeah there’s a lot more of creativity now that I know so that was absolutely fantastic. So yeah thank you for coming. Thank you for coming!

[Magda] Thank you, its been fun.

[Danyelle] Yeah, same!

[Danyelle] You can find Magda, her team and all the work that they’re doing at utdallas.edu/c4v — that’s the letter “C” like cat, the number four and the letter “V” like victory — and on Facebook and Twitter at @valuesinscience

[Ricard] The UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle] A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.