ChatGPT enhances creativity and problem-solving in ways that traditional search tools can’t match. Photo courtesy of Rice Business Wisdom

We all know ChatGPT has forever changed how we do business. It’s modified how we access information, compose content and analyze data. It’s revolutionized the future of work and education. And it has transformed the way we interact with technology.

Now, thanks to a recent paper by Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung (Rice Business), we also know it’s making us better problem solvers.

Key findings:

  • A recent study finds ChatGPT-generated ideas are deemed an average of 15% more creative than traditional methods.
  • ChatGPT enhances “incremental,” but not “radical,” innovation.
  • ChatGPT boosts creativity in tasks normally associated with human traits, like empathy-based challenges.

According to the study published in Nature Human Behavior by Chung and Byung Cheol Lee (University of Houston), ChatGPT enhances our problem-solving abilities, especially with everyday challenges. Whether coming up with gifts for your teenage niece or pondering what to do with an old tennis racquet, ChatGPT has a unique ability to generate creative ideas.

“Creative problem-solving often requires connecting different concepts in a cohesive way,” Chung says. “ChatGPT excels at this because it pulls from a vast range of data, enabling it to generate new combinations of ideas.”

Can ChatGPT Really Make Us More Creative?

Chung and Lee sought to answer a central question: Can ChatGPT help people think more creatively than traditional search engines? To answer this, they conducted five experiments.

Each experiment asked participants to generate ideas for solving challenges, such as how to repurpose household items. Depending on the experiment, participants were divided into one of two or three groups: one that used ChatGPT; one that used conventional web search tools (e.g., Google); and one that used no external tool at all. The resulting ideas were evaluated by both laypeople and business experts based on two critical aspects of creativity: originality and appropriateness (i.e., practicality).

In one standout experiment, participants were asked to come up with an idea for a dining table that doesn’t exist on the market. The ChatGPT group came up with suggestions like a “rotating table,” a “floating table” and even “a table that adjusts its height based on the dining experience.” According to both judges and experts, the ChatGPT group consistently delivered the most creative solutions.

On average, across all experiments, ideas generated with ChatGPT were rated 15% more creative than those produced by traditional methods. This was true even when tasks were specifically designed to require empathy or involved multiple constraints — tasks we typically assume humans might be better at performing.

However, Chung and Lee also found a caveat: While ChatGPT excels at generating ideas that are “incrementally” new — i.e., building on existing concepts — it struggles to produce “radically” new ideas that break from established patterns. “ChatGPT is an incredible tool for tweaking and improving existing ideas, but when it comes to disruptive innovation, humans still hold the upper hand,” Chung notes.

Charting the Next Steps in AI and Creativity

Chung and Lee’s paper opens the door to many exciting avenues for future study. For example, researchers could explore whether ChatGPT’s creative abilities extend to more complex, high-stakes problem-solving environments. Could AI be harnessed to develop groundbreaking solutions in fields like medicine, engineering or social policy? Understanding the nuances of the collaboration between humans and AI could shape the future of education, work and even (as many people fear) art.

For professionals in creative fields like product design or marketing, the study holds especially significant implications. The ability to rapidly generate fresh ideas can be a game-changer in industries where staying ahead of trends is vital. For now, take a second before you throw out that old tennis racquet. Ask ChatGPT for inspiration — you’ll be surprised at how many ideas it comes up with, and how quickly.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom. Based on research by Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung and Byung Cheol Lee (University of Houston). Lee and Chung, “An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity.” Nature Human Behavior (2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01953-1.


Here's what you should learn from social media influencers for your own business marketing. Photo via Getty Images

Key business marketing tips to take from top social media creators, according to these Houston researchers

houston voices

Influencer marketing is booming, with companies allocating 10 to 25 percent of their advertising budgets to influencer-led strategies. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of sponsored posts rose from 1.26 million to 6.12 million, and overall spending in the past few years has grown by billions.

When partnering with online ambassadors, brands certainly want a large influencer audience. However, audience size does not necessarily reflect the amount influencers are paid. Influencers with similar-sized audiences can be paid very different amounts.

That’s partly because brands also want an engaged influencer audience. An influencer may have many followers, but if those followers don’t actively interact with content, the influencer’s reach is limited. Engagement metrics like comments, shares and “likes” are often a more reliable indicator of impact than follower count alone.

The problem brands face — no matter who the influencer is — is that sponsored posts typically see a plunge in engagement, making it difficult to measure their success. Very little research examines this effect and how influencers can mitigate it.

In a new study, Rice Business professors Jae Chung and Ajay Kalra take up this issue, along with Stanford professor Yu Ding. According to the researchers, one way of boosting engagement overall, even on sponsored content where engagement often falls, is for influencers to increase audience perceptions of authenticity, perceived similarity, and interpersonal curiosity.

Even in a world full of filters and careful staging, authenticity is a key differentiator for leaders, businesses and personalities. One powerful way of appearing true to one’s own personality or character is to effectively share life stories. But social media influencers walk a fine line between presenting their authentic selves and monetizing their platforms.

To attract followers and content sponsors, influencers must curate the images they share, the words they say, and the timing and cadence of their posts. It’s a delicate dance between providing value through a genuine audience connection and aligning with brand interests.

Here are three simple but powerful ways that influencers can boost engagement by highlighting close relationships:

  • Post photos that include one or two close friends or family members.
  • Mention friends and family in the caption.
  • Use first-person language (e.g., “I,” “my” and “we”).

Referencing close social ties is an especially powerful way to boost engagement. According to Professor Chung, “Intimate social ties can make influencers seem more authentic and sponsored messaging seem less transactional.” This effect holds true even when controlling for variables like gender, frequency of posting, use of emojis and hashtags, and audience familiarity with the influencer.

The team analyzed over 55,000 Instagram posts from 763 top influencers during the second half of 2019. One of their most distinctive findings is that, in terms of boosting audience engagement, the ideal number of faces in a photo is three — the influencer plus two friends or family members. For an Instagram audience, this numerical face count proves a surprisingly effective metric for assessing the closeness of relationships.

Influencers can also seem more genuine to followers by referencing intimate social ties in their captions. Terms like “grandpa,” “bestie” and “soulmate” give followers access to an inner circle usually reserved for loved ones, making them feel more connected and invested in the influencer’s world and worldview.

In one experiment, study participants were shown a series of Instagram posts supposedly written by actor Jessica Alba. Testing the impact of language on the perception of close ties, the researchers wrote three different captions for the same image. One caption mentions Alba’s daughter (“Styling by my daughter. Isn’t this outfit cute?”). Another references a distant tie (“Styling by designer Kelmen. Isn’t this outfit cute?”). A third post provided a baseline by indicating no ties at all.

Study participants were asked to select which posts they liked most. The results supported the research hypothesis. Posts mentioning close relationships are significantly more likable than posts mentioning distant ties or no ties.

The team also examined the impact of expressing emotion on Instagram. Does sharing feelings — either positive or negative — help or hurt audience engagement? Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) language processing program, the researchers categorized and analyzed the strength and valence of emotion-related words and emojis (e.g., “love,” “nice,” “frustrated,” “sad”).

What they found is surprising. Expressing emotion boosts audience engagement, perhaps because it bridges a perceived gap of celebrity between influencer and audience. But what’s interesting is that negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones. According to the researchers’ dataset, negative emotions are expressed only 9.08 percent of the time, while positive feelings are shared 36.03 percent of the time. So, one way of interpreting the finding is that the comparative rarity of negative feeling could take some readers by surprise, and thereby incite a stronger sense of authenticity.

Importantly, all of these findings regarding audience engagement most likely apply to platforms where a gray line exists between private and public life.

And, on this note, the researchers warn against the potential for oversharing and exploiting family and friends for the sake of monetizing content.

But the study shows how brands can strategically sponsor posts that incorporate close ties in photos, express emotion, or share anecdotes in first-person language.

By quantifying tactics to achieve a greater perception of authenticity, the research provides valuable guidance on how to cut through the noise on social media. One of the paths to a more engaged audience, it turns out, runs through an influencer’s inner circle.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and was based on research from Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung, an assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business, Yu Ding an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Ajay Kalra, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Marketing at Rice Business.

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3 Houston innovators who made headlines in May 2025

Innovators to Know

Editor's note: Houston innovators are making waves this month with revolutionary VC funding, big steps towards humanoid robotics, and software that is impacting the agriculture sector. Here are three Houston innovators to know right now.

Zach Ellis, founder and partner of South Loop Ventures

Zach Ellis. Photo via LinkedIn

Zach Ellis Jr., founder and general partner of South Loop Ventures, says the firm wants to address the "billion-dollar blind spot" of inequitable distribution of venture capital to underrepresented founders of color. The Houston-based firm recently closed its debut fund for more than $21 million. Learn more.

Ty Audronis, CEO and founder of Tempest Droneworx

Ty Audronis, CEO and founder of Tempest Droneworx

Ty Audronis, center. Photo via LinkedIn.

Ty Audronis and his company, Tempest Droneworx, made a splash at SXSW Interactive 2025, winning the Best Speed Pitch award at the annual festival. The company is known for it flagship product, Harbinger, a software solution that agnostically gathers data at virtually any scale and presents that data in easy-to-understand visualizations using a video game engine. Audronis says his company won based on its merits and the impact it’s making and will make on the world, beginning with agriculture. Learn more.

Nicolaus Radford, CEO of Persona AI

Nicolaus Radford, founder and CEO of Nauticus RoboticsNicolaus Radford. Image via LinkedIn

Houston-based Persona AI and CEO Nicolaus Radford continue to make steps toward deploying a rugged humanoid robot, and with that comes the expansion of its operations at Houston's Ion. Radford and company will establish a state-of-the-art development center in the prominent corner suite on the first floor of the building, with the expansion slated to begin in June. “We chose the Ion because it’s more than just a building — it’s a thriving innovation ecosystem,” Radford says. Learn more.

Houston university to launch artificial intelligence major, one of first in nation

BS in AI

Rice University announced this month that it plans to introduce a Bachelor of Science in AI in the fall 2025 semester.

The new degree program will be part of the university's department of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and is one of only a few like it in the country. It aims to focus on "responsible and interdisciplinary approaches to AI," according to a news release from the university.

“We are in a moment of rapid transformation driven by AI, and Rice is committed to preparing students not just to participate in that future but to shape it responsibly,” Amy Dittmar, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in the release. “This new major builds on our strengths in computing and education and is a vital part of our broader vision to lead in ethical AI and deliver real-world solutions across health, sustainability and resilient communities.”

John Greiner, an assistant teaching professor of computer science in Rice's online Master of Computer Science program, will serve as the new program's director. Vicente Ordóñez-Román, an associate professor of computer science, was also instrumental in developing and approving the new major.

Until now, Rice students could study AI through elective courses and an advanced degree. The new bachelor's degree program opens up deeper learning opportunities to undergrads by blending traditional engineering and math requirements with other courses on ethics and philosophy as they relate to AI.

“With the major, we’re really setting out a curriculum that makes sense as a whole,” Greiner said in the release. “We are not simply taking a collection of courses that have been created already and putting a new wrapper around them. We’re actually creating a brand new curriculum. Most of the required courses are brand new courses designed for this major.”

Students in the program will also benefit from resources through Rice’s growing AI ecosystem, like the Ken Kennedy Institute, which focuses on AI solutions and ethical AI. The university also opened its new AI-focused "innovation factory," Rice Nexus, earlier this year.

“We have been building expertise in artificial intelligence,” Ordóñez-Román added in the release. “There are people working here on natural language processing, information retrieval systems for machine learning, more theoretical machine learning, quantum machine learning. We have a lot of expertise in these areas, and I think we’re trying to leverage that strength we’re building.”