Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: A Complex Relationship

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly impacted various aspects of our lives, including our creative endeavors. AI has both positive and negative implications for our creative pursuits, and it’s essential to understand these complexities.

Source: cdn2.psychologytoday.com

According to recent figures, approximately 24 percent of adults in the United States use AI chatbots daily, while 36 percent of Americans interact with AI at least several times a day. This widespread usage of AI has raised questions about its impact on creativity. Can AI enhance our creative abilities, or does it replace our natural creativity?

Research on AI and Creativity

Studies have been conducted to explore the relationship between AI and creativity. A 2024 creative writing experiment involved 293 participants, each of whom was asked to write a short, eight-sentence story. The researchers found that individuals who had access to AI-generated story ideas created narratives that were judged to be ‘more creative, better written, and more enjoyable.’ This was particularly true for those subjects who were deemed to be less-creative writers.

However, the researchers also noted a trade-off: AI-assisted stories were more similar to one another than those produced without the intervention of AI. This suggests that while AI can raise individual creativity, it may lower the creative diversity of a group.

A prepublication research paper (2024/2025) described an experiment in which 800 individuals were introduced to either human-generated or ChatGPT-generated ideas and then asked to generate ideas of their own. The results showed that exposure to a high volume of AI-generated ideas did not necessarily improve the creativity of individual ideas, but it did affect the collective evolution of ideas. The researchers concluded that AI made ideas different, but not necessarily better.

A preprint/meta-analysis (2025) of 28 empirical studies involving 8,214 subjects found some evidence that AI can improve human creative performance. The effect was modest, but statistically meaningful. The researchers also discovered a compelling counter-effect: there was a substantial decline in idea diversity when AI was used to generate new concepts.

These studies, along with several others, underscore an intriguing question: When everyone has access to the same creative partner (such as ChatGPT), are we all now more creative, or are we all thinking the same?

The Implications of AI on Creativity

The prevailing research suggests that AI, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily make everyone more creative. Rather, AI seems to alter how creativity happens. We can decide to use AI as a substitute for our own imaginative shortcomings, or we can use it as a catalyst for expanding our creative endeavors.

AI can become a creative partner—one able to generate multiple ideas or possibilities beyond the range or experience of a specific individual. Steve Jobs once said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things’—specifically linking seemingly unrelated ideas. AI has the ability to collect information from diverse fields, allowing humans to envision a range of (normally) improbable possibilities.

When generating ideas, we often get stuck on the first thing that comes into our mind. AI, on the other hand, can assist humans in moving beyond those initial concepts by generating a plethora of previously unconsidered or unknown ideas. Writers are quite familiar with the ‘blank page/blank screen syndrome’—that is, overcoming ‘mental inertia’ at the beginning of a new project or fresh challenge. AI can give writers (and other creatives) a starting point that allows them to expand, modify, alter, or revise.

However, there are also downsides to using AI as a creative tool. With AI, the ‘ownership’ of original and innovative ideas diminishes. The ideas generated are machine-based rather than human-conceived. The line between those two concepts diminishes, and we often wind up with ideas more artificial than personal.

For many creatives, part of the experience is in the struggle to discover, select, and modify ideas appropriate for a new challenge. AI removes that option—it ‘pre-selects’ the ‘correct answer(s)’ without human intervention or consideration. Our ‘intellectual investment’ is limited when using AI. That is to say, if we are comfortable with whatever AI offers in response to a question, then we give up the necessary cognitive ‘homework’ that underpins creative thinking.

AI, quite often, produces a creative ‘regression to the mean.’ In other words, if everyone is using the same AI platform (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Grammarly, Gemini) for their writing, artistic work, advertising, or other creative endeavors, the resulting products all begin to look and sound the same. On the surface, it may look creative but actually reflect homogenized information.

AI ‘averages’ creativity. AI relies on the input of large amounts of human-created material. As a result, the information it shares is often predictable assumptions, familiar patterns, popular conventions, rational solutions, or everyday logic. Those first few ideas may be more common than novel, and more familiar than distinct.

According to the American Psychological Association, creativity is ‘the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness.’ Noteworthy in that definition is the term ‘creative individual’—an indication that creative expression is fundamentally a human trait, rather than one generated by machines. It also raises a commanding query: ‘What happens to our personal creativity when we regularly collaborate with artificial creativity?’