AI Generates More Ideas, but Human Collaboration Yields Greater Creativity

Generative AI can produce a flood of ideas quickly, but a recent study shows that when people brainstorm with another human, they generate more original and diverse concepts than when they rely on ChatGPT. Researchers gave 208 participants an alternate‑uses task and compared pairs of humans to pairs of humans and the chatbot. The AI‑assisted teams wrote longer responses, yet the human‑human teams produced a higher number of distinct ideas and a greater semantic distance between concepts. The study also found that AI answers tend to be verbose, with only 42 % of the text containing the core answer, and that repeated use of the same model leads to homogenized, “visual elevator music”‑style outputs. Over long‑term projects, this convergence could narrow the creative space, underscoring the value of human collaboration in innovation.