How is AI affecting collaboration and creativity? Cognitive scientists ran an experiment to find out.

The productivity gains of generative AI are often touted as the main reason for its rapid adoption. Much like how a calculator can instantly solve mathematical equations too long for the human brain to compute, generative AI can help someone quickly summarize long articles and draft emails.

But beyond productivity, a key question remains: How is AI affecting quintessentially human activities, such as collaboration and creativity?

As cognitive scientists who study creativity, we recently conducted an experiment that explored how working with AI—rather than humans—affects originality and other aspects of creativity.

Creativity is often tied to what cognitive scientists call “divergent thinking.” One way of measuring divergent thinking is to ask someone to come up with a range of uses for a common item, such as a brick or a book. This is known as the alternate uses task.

Researchers then compare the number of ideas and the originality of these ideas to assess creative capacity.

Large language models appear to have the “number of ideas” part down pat: They can generate many more ideas than humans can. This ability to produce more—and produce that high volume more quickly—partially explains why more than half of new articles online are now generated by AI.

These texts, however, are often verbose, with redundant information. Researchers who tested 12 AI chatbots across different companies on thousands of factual questions found that their answers were often many times longer than human-written answers, with the actual answer making up only about 42% of the text.

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