Why This AI Startup Wants Its Bots to Hallucinate for Creativity

This AI Startup Embraces Hallucinations to Spark Creative Inspiration

AI often gets a bad rap for "hallucinating"—making up false information and presenting it as fact. But what if that tendency could be flipped into a creative advantage? That’s exactly what Springboards, a creative AI tool, is doing. Instead of fighting hallucinations, Springboards encourages them, generating wildly inaccurate outputs to fuel fresh ideas.

Seeking Outliers, Not Accuracy

“When I’m looking for inspiration, I want ideas that are outside the norm,” says Pip Bingemann, CEO and co-founder of Springboards. The startup isn’t interested in polishing AI to be factually perfect. Instead, it leans into the unexpected and the bizarre to help creatives break free from conventional thinking.

Springboards also helps users find which AI models suit their creative style best. Its new Creativity Benchmark test, supported by industry groups like the 4As and the International Advertising Association, measures AI’s ability to inspire creativity based on output variance, problem-solving, and human judgment.

Tinder for Ideas

Traditional large language models excel where answers are right or wrong, like in exams. But creativity thrives on variety and surprise. Bingemann compares tools to wrenches: great for plumbers but not so useful for journalists.

Springboards offers a “Tinder for ideas” experience. Users swipe through different AI-generated creative outputs and select their favorites. Over time, the system learns which AI models align with their preferences.

Eventually, Bingemann hopes to analyze broader trends across industries, roles, and geographies. The goal isn’t to quantify creativity itself, but to identify which AI models best spark it.

More Than Just Random Inspiration

Springboards keeps humans central to the creative process. Bingemann stresses they don’t aim to replace creative professionals, but to amplify human insight.

One of their tools, Insight Digger, combines multiple AI models—including Perplexity, OpenAI, and Gemini—to generate brand strategy ideas with over ten times the variation you’d get from any single model.

Take Lay’s potato chips as an example. At baseline, Insight Digger suggests tones like “crunchy” and “sociable” alongside accurate brand history. But turn up the “randomness” dial—offering settings like micro-dosing, LSD, and Asylum—and the outputs get wildly imaginative. Suddenly, you might see tone suggestions like “galactic” or “socks!” and a brand history featuring a monocle-wearing “Sir Spudington” skinny dipping in a vat of oil.

Trust, But Verify

Users must approach these hallucinations with caution. Accuracy isn’t guaranteed, even with the randomness dial off. Bingemann admits the brand history sometimes shifts between fact and fiction, such as whether Lay’s started in a barn or out of a car trunk.

There’s value in AI that doesn’t spit out the same answer every time. For example, standard AI often defaults to the number seven when asked for a random number between one and ten. Springboards’ approach resists that predictability.

Still, questioning every output can be tiring. And some argue that relying on random AI inspiration risks watering down human brainstorming. How much credit belongs to the machine behind “Sir Spudington”?

Humans Still Hold the Reins

Bingemann isn’t worried about AI taking over creativity. Machines lack emotional experience—no heartbreak or joy—so they can’t fully grasp human nuance. If AI alone designed brand creative, visuals might be polished and production cheaper, but the soul of media would suffer.

His concern is a future where cost-cutting chases blandness, sacrificing depth for cheap outputs.

For creatives looking to experiment with AI-driven inspiration, Springboards offers a fresh perspective: sometimes, the best ideas come from letting AI wander off-script. Just remember to keep your own judgment front and center.

For those interested in exploring AI tools that boost creativity and strategy, check out Complete AI Training’s collection of AI copywriting tools.