Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content

Creativity is core to being human. Generative AI—made readily available by
powerful large language models (LLMs)—holds promise for humans to be more
creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on
generative AI ideas. We study the causal impact of generative AI ideas on
the production of short stories in an online experiment where some writers
obtained story ideas from an LLM. We find that access to generative AI
ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and
more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However,
generative AI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories
by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual
creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty. This dynamic
resembles a social dilemma: with generative AI, writers are individually
better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is
produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers,
and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity.