AI makes go players more creative

Among all the doomsday scenarios about AI (artificial intelligence), there is now also a bright spot. A new study shows that people become smarter and more creative when they have to compete against AI, at least when it comes to the board game go. The successes of the computer program AlphaGo by Google appear to encourage human go players to perform better.
For their study, the researchers analyzed 5.8 million moves that occurred in go games between 1950 and 2021. After 2016, when AlphaGo also started beating the best human players, the quality of human moves clearly went up.
In part this was about moves and strategies that the players had copied from AlphaGo, but they were also increasingly introducing new, innovative moves that had not been seen before in the game of go and were of a medium high level.

Does this also apply to other situations, does AI make people more creative?

In poker, at least, it has led to the introduction of new strategies, such as the so-called overbet (when a player makes a bet that is larger than the existing pot). But whether this also applies to, for example, ChatGPT, the text generator, is less clear. How good a text is, or how beautiful an image is, is subjective. It is difficult to determine how such programs influence human decisions, and therefore more difficult to predict and study. That is why the researchers will first investigate whether they also find the same effect in other board games.
In any case, this research shows that 'man' is not completely defenseless against AI, but adapts to it and knows how to come up with creative solutions. And that is in any case something with which we can (continue to) distinguish ourselves from AI...