Beyond the Brush: Human Versus AI Creativity in the Realm of Generative Art

Several decades ago, J.P. Guilford (1950) speculated that, although artificial intelligence (AI) might one day take over much of human thinking, creativity would remain a uniquely human faculty. However, rapid advancements in AI have led to the recent development of generative models that are capable of producing high-quality creative products, casting some doubt Guilford’s prediction. Here, to shed light on this issue, we explored whether human creativity retains distinct value in the emerging domain of AI-assisted digital artworks. Using DALL-E 3, we generated images based on prompts crafted by professional artists, novice artists, and an AI chatbot (ChatGPT-4). Creativity ratings from 299 participants showed that images produced from professional-artist prompts were rated as most creative, followed by those generated from AI-chatbot prompts, with novice-artist prompts rated lowest. Further analysis suggested that this pattern may be partially explained by the semantic distance of the prompts, which followed the same pattern (i.e., professionals > AI chatbot > novices). These findings suggest that, although AI demonstrates impressive creative abilities, the worth of human creativity has not been diminished in the domain of AI-assisted outputs, which supports Guilford’s view on the enduring value of human creativity.