Generative Artificial Intelligence Enhances Creativity

Creativity is core to the human experience. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas and new paths of creative possibilities. However, ideas provided by GenAI may also anchor a human creator, resulting in less creative output. Here, we study for the first time the causal impact of GenAI on the production of a creative output, focusing on the creation of short stories. In an online experimental study, some writers are offered the opportunity to obtain ideas for a story from a GenAI platform. We find that access to GenAI ideas causes an increase in the writer's creativity by 8% to 9% over stories written by human writers with no GenAI assistance, as assessed by third party evaluators. Stories written with access to GenAI ideas are considered to be better written and more enjoyable, with improvements of up to 22% to 26% among less creative writers. Despite more positive subjective evaluations, an analysis using embeddings of the texts demonstrates that stories by writers with GenAI access are more similar to each other—and to the initial GenAI idea—than stories by humans alone. Consequently, stories produced by writers with GenAI assistance are viewed less as reflecting the author's own ideas. Our experiment is designed for causal inference rather than a personalized writing experience, suggesting that further development in GenAI may be able to push the boundaries of human creativity further. Our results have direct implications for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering human creativity in all sectors of the economy.