What does artificial intelligence do to creativity? Are generative AI tools making us more creative, or less? Given that creativity is often the engine behind the most successful ideas and ventures, and that 83% of senior executives rank innovation among their top three priorities, understanding how using AI affects human creativity is critical for businesses.1 On the one hand, generative AI can act as a valuable brainstorming partner, enabling inventors and designers to rapidly prototype ideas and concepts. On the other hand, it risks inadvertently constraining creativity by narrowing the search space too early and encouraging users to anchor on AI-generated suggestions that seem “good enough.”

Across four recent studies, our research reveals that the truth lies beyond this simple binary. We have found that although AI can enhance individual creativity, it reduces collective creativity. To explain why this occurs, we should first clarify what we mean by creativity.

From Individual Creativity to Societal Innovation

Scholars typically define creativity as the intersection of novelty and usefulness.2 Novelty is the degree to which an idea or artifact is original or rare, and usefulness is the degree to which it is valuable or effective in achieving its purpose. An idea that is novel but useless or useful but unoriginal is not creative.

While these dimensions capture the creativity of a single idea, the dimension that best captures the creativity of a group of ideas is its diversity. Any collection of ideas may contain a few that are novel to some but obvious to others, or novel yet not useful.