I've been thinking about how to gain the same benefit without needing to take time away.

Ive been thinking about this for years too. So if you do come up with a definitive practical system for this, I would love to know.

I can't vouch for the validity of all of them but these are some other approaches I'm aware of:

Role Playing - looking at a canvas and asking (either literally or just thinking silently in a similar manner) in quick succession "What would Yaoi Kusama do now with it?" "What would Rothko do with it?" "What would Vermeer do with it?" "What would Egon Shiele do with it?".

This can be coupled with rubber-ducking where you imagine a dialogue with the person you're role-playing.

Change the Medium - you've already mentioned speaking out written words, but other approaches might involve putting a Word Document into PDF form and reading it, maybe switching from a tablet to a desktop or vice versa. Then there is of course the option of physically printing it. Changing the typeface and font size are also ways of evoking similar effects.

Starting from Scratch - sometimes it is useful to rather than wait to come back to something, simply stop working on the first draft arbitrarily and begin from the beginning again during the same session. Unless you're a human xerox machine you're unlikely to create a near-perfect copy, those small differences may suggest new and effective paths.

The Cut-up Approach - David Bowie used this technique^[1], and got the idea himself from William Burroughs. The original process was to take text, like lyrics, and cut out individual lines into strips and then shuffle them about. While the signal to noise ratio may be a bit onerous, if you're trying to use it as a means of stoking new perspectives it could be effective (especially nowadays where can use any number of automated methods to do this for us).
Vladimir Nabokov used a similar technique, while he wrote on numbered index cards, he could - in a pinch, shuffle them and "deal himself a novel"^[2].^[3]

Devil's Advocate/Steelmanning your opposition - If I'm writing something, sometimes I try to first reduce my bias by trying to dishonestly but persuasively as possible write an essay for the opposing view. I believe this was an important way of teaching classical rhetoric^[4]

Asking yourself 'why?'- This advice I am hypocritical to give as I need to take it myself. This applies both on the micro and macro levels. Why are you writing this function in your code? (and why are you using this particular algorithm to do it?) all the way up to what is the intended purpose of this entire project?
If you're painting something, why are you painting this blue dot in the bottom right hand corner? Why blue?
I am prone to bouts of fixation and forget the actual intention or utility that lead me down this rabbit hole in the first place - noticing when I'm fixated, and reminding myself of the original intention is often a good way of changing perspective. But this more applies to the feeling of "stuckness" or "bashing your head against a wall".

 

1. ^{^}

   I was under the impression he wrote Life on Mars this way, but it appears I've confabulated reviewers descriptions of "cut up lyrics"

2. ^{^}

   Writing on index cards, in pencil, had become Nabokov's preferred method of composition. He would fill each card with narrative and dialogue, shuffle the completed pack and then, in the words of his editor, "deal himself a novel".
   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/25/nabokov-original-of-laura-mccrum

3. ^{^}

   I am speculating here - but I believe that the very interesting repetitions and assonance that you'll find in some of Nabokov's later books, where a Dog seen by Hugh Pearson in an early chapter is brought back years later in a final chapter, a throwaway reference to a inmate in prison for strangulation which foreshadows another character's fate, and other butterfly-wing-like symmetries are probably a direct result of this method of shuffling.

4. ^{^}

   In the very end of Aristotle's Topics he seems to suggest that students of Rhetoric and Philosophy should actively adopt an opposition to their definitions in an argument to mitigate any "shortcomings"
   In combating definitions it is always one of the chief elementary principles to take by oneself a happy shot at a definition of the object before one, or to adopt some correctly expressed definition. For one is bound, with the model (as it were) before one's eyes, to discern both any shortcoming in any features that the definition ought to have, and also any superfluous addition, so that one is better supplied with lines of attack. 

I think the general solution to this problem is to learn to work very fast - faster than your perception can get tired. 5 minute sketches in art, improvising in music. And becoming comfortable with throwing away and redoing stuff instead of tweaking it.

I also agree "AI" is overloaded and has existing connotations (ranging from algorithms to applications as well)! I would think generative models, or generative AI works better (and one can specify multimodal generative models if one wants to be super clear), but also curious to see what other people would propose.

I just saw the term 'Synthetic Intelligence' thrown forward, which I quite like.

https://front-end.social/@heydon/115071424831331716

You probably don’t like the term LLM because it doesn’t describe capability. And most model are multimodal these days, so it is not just natural language. 

You also wouldn’t like the term Autoregressive/Next-token predictor. Still because it says what it does, not what it is capable of.

AI is a pretty good term. As overloaded as it is.

 

Please also consider the consequences of timelines WRT preparing for the arrival of AGI/ASI. From this perspective, accurate predictions of the technology and its consequences are very useful. For raw timelines, rring on the side of shorter seems much more useful in that if people think timelines are shorter they will for the most part be more prepared when it actually happens.

Erring on the side of longer timelines has the potential to be disastrous. People seem to tend toward complacency anyway. Thinking they've got a long time to prepare seems to make it much likelier that we'll be collectively unprepared, and thus quite possibly all die.

This isn't an argument to distort your timelines, just to make sure you're not overestimating, and to emphasize the real possibility of short timelines given the large uncertainty.