Chris Gash/theispot.com
What does artificial intelligence do to creativity? Are generative AI tools making us more creative, or less? Given that creativity is often the engine behind the most successful ideas and ventures, and that 83% of senior executives rank innovation among their top three priorities, understanding how using AI affects human creativity is critical for businesses.1 On the one hand, generative AI can act as a valuable brainstorming partner, enabling inventors and designers to rapidly prototype ideas and concepts. On the other hand, it risks inadvertently constraining creativity by narrowing the search space too early and encouraging users to anchor on AI-generated suggestions that seem “good enough.”
Across four recent studies, our research reveals that the truth lies beyond this simple binary. We have found that although AI can enhance individual creativity, it reduces collective creativity. To explain why this occurs, we should first clarify what we mean by creativity.
From Individual Creativity to Societal Innovation
Scholars typically define creativity as the intersection of novelty and usefulness.2 Novelty is the degree to which an idea or artifact is original or rare, and usefulness is the degree to which it is valuable or effective in achieving its purpose. An idea that is novel but useless or useful but unoriginal is not creative.
While these dimensions capture the creativity of a single idea, the dimension that best captures the creativity of a group of ideas is its diversity. Any collection of ideas may contain a few that are novel to some but obvious to others, or novel yet not useful. But a highly diverse set is more likely to contain a few highly original outliers that are both genuinely original and potentially valuable. This breadth provides teams with more raw material to recombine, compare, and refine over time, yielding products that better match the full range of customer preferences. After all, ideas that initially appear to be impractical can turn out to be breakthroughs once they have been refined or recombined: for example, the “failed” adhesive that became the Post-it Note or the abandoned video game whose internal communication tool became Slack. In other words, creativity requires more than just quantity and quality of output. It also requires diversity of output, where different ideas can spark new lines of inquiry, new speculation, and new seeds that breed new innovations.
By casting a wider net, organizations can guard against premature convergence on safe, conventional options, increasing the odds of surprising, high-impact breakthroughs. This, however, is where our research reveals an interesting paradox. Individually, AI often enhances creativity, particularly by enabling less experienced or less inherently creative individuals to generate more novel and useful ideas. But collectively, AI often “compresses” the idea space. Because many people anchor on similar AI-generated suggestions, outputs converge. A typical output produced with AI assistance is more creative, but the variance of the full set of outputs decreases. In short, even if an AI-inspired idea looks good, it may turn out to be similar to everyone else’s AI-inspired ideas.
For managers, the implication is profound. The challenge is to harness AI’s productivity and quality benefits while preserving the diversity of ideas that fuels long-term innovation.
Impact of AI on Idea Diversity
To understand how AI affects creative diversity, we analyzed four recent studies we worked on that span different creative domains: short-story writing, circular-economy solutions, humor caption contests, and collaborative storytelling. Despite the varied contexts, a consistent pattern emerged: AI assistance improved individual output quality while narrowing collective diversity.
In the first of these studies, two of us (Anil and Oliver) examined how access to AI influences the creative process and the diversity of collective output.3 In this experiment, participants were asked to write short, eight-sentence stories. Some people wrote entirely on their own, while others were given up to five three-sentence story seeds generated by an AI model. Independent evaluators rated the individual creativity of each participant’s story. We also used AI-based text analysis to measure the degree of semantic similarity among the stories, comparing those written with versus without AI assistance.
The results revealed the core tension. We found that AI assistance improved story novelty, especially for writers with a lower baseline level of creativity (as measured beforehand with an existing paradigm, the Divergent Association Task). Yet at the collective level, diversity declined. Stories from the AI-assisted groups converged on more similar beats or structures, showing less variance than those written without AI. (See the story-writing graphics.) This suggests a social dilemma: While individuals gain from AI, especially those who struggle most with creative tasks, widespread reliance risks narrowing the collective pool of ideas, leaving us with higher average quality but fewer distinctive outliers.
In a second study one of us worked on (Léonard, with four collaborators), this pattern held in a very different domain.4 We asked participants to propose circular-economy solutions to address sustainability challenges, such as repurposing waste materials. A human-only crowd produced a broad range of ideas, from conventional recycling proposals to unique, unconventional ones such as innovative bricks made from foundry dust and waste plastic with a Lego-like interlocking design to reduce construction-related air pollution. In contrast, a single human working with AI often surpassed the crowd in independent evaluators’ ratings of overall quality, strategic viability, and financial and environmental value. But the human crowd scored higher on novelty, and the unusual ideas that might spark breakthroughs emerged mostly from the human-only group. Once again, AI raised the floor of performance but narrowed the variance in outputs. (See the circular-economy graphic.)
