Ideas are related to imagination and imagination to creativity. And creativity leads to either invention or innovation where invention amounts to absolute creativity, that is, the outcome is unique or original* whereas innovation is creativity through variation or incremental change. That is, innovation based on modification or combination of what already exists and constitutes the vast majority of "new" products and services for the marketplace. In this the marketplace demonstrates its capacity to assimilate, modify and commodify almost any idea. Ideation for innovation, then, can be seen as a creative thought process through variation. But variation is also key in the development of artifcial intelligence, AI..That is, generative artificial intelligence, GAI learns continuously from the accumulating data and outcomes and is getting better and better with time increasing its ability to change, adapt and grow based on new data. As a result GAI at maturity is capable of indefinitely generating new ideas that are combinative derivations of already known forms and patterns. Innovation by artificial versus human intelligence, then, is not mutually exclusive, that is, both are capable of achieving compatible results. However, convergence of human and artificial intelligence suggests that a designer response to the advancement of AI is to emphasise the subjective and the intuitive, that is, to give evidence of an essentially human action, to mark the subjectivity of the idea itself. Indeed, AI only acts based on prior data and, lacking human intuition would struggle to have an answer to new unique circumstances. This further suggests that GAI is built for innovation rather than invention. GAI, then, through its capacity for variational creativity, has the potential to become a major ideation tool for innovation in the marketplace. That is, ideation by AI, or AIdeation. * What is described as original design of use is ultimately defined by intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and trademarks).
