AI Doesn’t Level the Playing Field for Creativity, Study Finds

Evan Kirstel, a mega-influencer in the technology space, has been doing some vrey cute things with AI lately, planting himself in the midst of past and current event videos on his Facebook posts. (For example, in one post: evan introduces Apple’s technology in 1946.) Highly creative indeed,but Evan already has an extremely high creativity quotient. The question is,can AI help everyone,even you left-brainers,elevate creativity?

AI – notably generative AI – has potential to “democratize” creativity. Though, creative types still stand to benefit much more from AI. It turns out individual differences still matter for creativity when everyone has access to the same advanced technology. That’s the conclusion of a recent study led by Simone Luchini and Roger Beaty of Pennsylvania State University, along with James C. Kaufman of University of Connecticut.

The question they posed is whether genAI will “democratize creativity, possibly minimizing individual differences by offering powerful tools for anyone to generate ideas, stories, and more.” In other words,with all this technology,creativity would no longer be a unique human trait.

Across two studies,the researchers tested whether two factors – creative ability – assessed via idea generation and story-writing tasks — and general intelligence – assessed via reasoning and knowledge tests – predict performance in creative collaboration with large language models (LLMs).

The result: “people with more creative task expertise and those with higher baseline cognitive abilities still produced more original ideas, despite all participants having equal access to a powerful LLM,” they found.

The study points to AI-assisted creativity as a “unique