Human teams produced more varied ideas than teams paired with AI

In two creative tasks, people working with GPT-4o did not match the originality and variety of human-only pairs.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

Researchers randomly assigned participants to 68 human-human pairs or 72 human-AI pairs. The pairs alternated who responded first while completing an Alternate Uses Task, which asks for unusual uses for an object, and a creative short-story task.

Human-human collaboration produced stronger creativity that increased over time. Although GPT-4o generated more verbose responses, working with it did not improve the originality or diversity of the group’s ideas and was linked to less creative responses from its human partners.

How the pairs generated ideas

Human-human pairs showed higher collaborative creativity than human-AI pairs across the study’s creative tasks. Their originality and diversity strengthened over time, whereas collaboration with GPT-4o did not enhance those qualities. People paired with GPT-4o also produced less creative responses than people working with human partners. The apparent AI advantage was attributed mainly to the system’s greater verbosity, not to more creative ideas.

Why creative teamwork matters

The findings question the assumption that adding a current generative AI system automatically improves creative teamwork. They suggest that producing longer responses is not the same as helping a group generate more original or varied ideas, with implications for how AI systems are designed and used in collaborative creative work.

Evidence and limits

This was a preregistered study with random assignment, comparing 68 human-human pairs with 72 human-AI pairs across two tasks. The AI condition used GPT-4o, and participants alternated the order in which they responded. The evidence therefore concerns these tasks, pair-based collaborations and this AI system; the abstract does not establish whether the same pattern would hold for other creative activities, group sizes or AI systems.

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