The Roles of Idea Generation and Elaboration in Human-AI Collaborative Creativity

Creativity is a fundamental ability of humans, vital to most domains of work and art. With the rising popularity of generative AI, research is needed to determine its costs and benefits for human creativity. We conducted a naturalistic study with university students (N = 263) who wrote short-stories with and without the help of ChatGPT. Stories written with AI assistance were significantly more original, but also more semantically similar to each other (i.e., less diverse). Critically, using a novel analysis of participant-AI interactions, we found that benefits in story originality were specifically predicted by engagement in idea generation with ChatGPT (prompting the AI to provide new story concepts, plot elements, or character ideas), but not idea elaboration (asking the AI to refine, reframe, or evaluate previously generated ideas). Additionally, we found that incorporating AI-generated content into the stories directly correlated with increased originality. Our findings suggest that AI-driven benefits depend on active engagement specifically focused on idea generation, although AI collaboration can limit idea diversity.