Incorporating Generative Artificial Intelligence Into Creative Work – A Paradox Perspective

Incorporating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into creative work poses paradoxical tensions, despite its potential to assist human creativity. Through qualitative interviews with 24 professionals, we explored how the professionals navigate these tensions in creative tasks. The identified cocreation paradox highlights tensions between human creativity and GenAI regeneration. Together with the collaboration paradox, which contrasts human contextual understanding with GenAI computational processing, it explains the observed limitations in the human-GenAI teamwork in creative tasks. Two other paradoxes, the GenAI efficiency and sufficiency, explain the checks and balances needed in more frequent GenAI use as part of creative work. Finally, the intuitivity paradox identified a level of GenAI ambiguity and a need for targeted training to optimize GenAI use, despite its straightforward user interface. Recognizing these paradoxes contributes to the understanding and integration of GenAI tools in organisations, spurring future research and fostering a more balanced approach toward augmenting human creative processes.