The Role of Mindsets in Creative Ideation with AI

With the widespread adoption of generative AI for everyday tasks, recent studies have investigated whether access to an AI tool affects people’s creative ideation, finding that participants who use tools risk producing ideas that are homogenous with other users’. This highlights a key tension in the use of generative AI: On the individual level people experience real and perceived gains, but when evaluated on the group level ideas are largely similar to each other. Mindsets about AI have the potential to serve as a buffer against such homogenization. For example, intervention science research on motivating adolescents to self-regulate their social media use suggests that people are highly sensitive to the rationale behind certain instructions. Instead of the traditional, dominant messages highlighting the health and academic benefits of eliminating social media, Galla et al. (2021) implemented a values-alignment message that appealed to adolescents’ values of autonomy and social justice, urging them to take back control from social media companies (“Every time you download an app that tracks how much time you spend on social media, every time you learn a new strategy to take control over your phone, it’s money out of their pockets…”). Similarly, promoting AI users’ sense of autonomy when using AI may increase their agentic usage relative to the traditional, idealistic messaging from tech companies and workplaces encouraging their employees to adopt AI. To test this hypothesis, we will assign participants to one of three conditions, two with AI access and a control condition without. The two AI access conditions mirror real-world framings of AI in the workplace, but differ with respect to the benefits they emphasize. In the Pilot condition, participants will be encouraged to use AI to enhance their creativity by maintaining control of the tool. In the Passenger condition, participants will read about the convenience of generative AI and be encouraged to let it do the heavy lifting for them. In the control condition, participants will complete the creative task without any AI assistance. We will compare the originality of individual ideas and the homogeneity of sets of ideas to address our overarching question about the outcomes associated with the use of generative AI tools in a creative context.