Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)
holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less
creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI ideas
on the production of an unstructured creative output in an online experimental
study where some writers could obtain ideas for a story from a GenAI platform.
We find that access to GenAI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more
creative, better written and more enjoyable, especially among less creative
writers. However, objective measures of story similarity within each condition
reveal that GenAI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories
by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity,
but at the same time there is a risk of losing collective novelty: this dynamic
resembles a social dilemma where individual writers are better off using GenAI
to improve their own writing, but collectively a narrower scope of novel
content may be produced with GenAI. Our results have implications for
researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering
creativity, but point to potential downstream consequences from over-reliance.

通过在线实验研究，我们得出结论：使用 GenAI 平台获取灵感会导致作品被评定为更具创造力、写作更好、更令人愉快，尤其是在创造力较低的作家中。然而，每个条件内的故事相似性的客观度量揭示出，相比于单独由人类创作的故事，GenAI 生成的故事更加相似。这些结果表明了个人创造力的增加，但同时也存在着过度依赖的潜在后果，可能会导致集体创新的缺失。