Artificial intelligence can now beat average humans in creativity, study finds
Artificial intelligence can now beat average humans in creativity, study finds
Publish Date: 2026-01-24 16:07:00
Source Domain: www.thebrighterside.news
- Scientists from three universities conducted a large-scale study comparing human creativity with modern large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, led by Professor Karim Jerbi and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
- The study, published in Scientific Reports, utilized over 100,000 human participants and examined AI’s ability through divergent thinking tasks and creative writing.
- Results showed that some AI models outperformed average human scores on specific tasks, specifically using the Divergent Association Task (DAT), while the top human performers still excelled.
- AI’s performance varied greatly, with GPT-4 achieving higher average scores than the human sample, indicating AI can match human creativity in certain measurable ways.
- However, even the highest performing AI still lacked the creativity and depth of the top 10 percent of human creators.
- The study highlighted inherent differences in how humans and machines generate ideas, with AI models often relying on a narrow set of words, while humans exhibited greater variety.
- Creativity in AI could be tuned by settings like temperature and prompt design, showing that AI creativity heavily depends on human guidance.
- While AI can replicate and sometimes surpass average human creative outputs on tasks like word lists, human creativity in more complex, idea-interconnected domains remains superior.
- The researchers concluded that AI should not be seen as a replacement but rather as a powerful augmentation to human creativity, emphasizing its role in enhancing and supporting creative processes.
