The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Creative and Strategic Capabilities of Generative Ai: Evidence from Large-Scale Experiments
Open accessAbstract
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made substantial progress, but its full capabilities remain unclear, and we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how people augment productivity with AI and perceive AI-generated outputs. This study compares the ability of AI to a representative population of US adults in creative and strategic tasks. The creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative than those created by humans. Moreover, ChatGPT is substantially more creative than humans, while Bard lags behind. Augmenting humans with AI improves human creativity, albeit not as much as ideas created by ChatGPT alone. Competition from AI does not significantly reduce the creativity of men, but it decreases the creativity of women. Humans who rate the text cannot discriminate well between ideas created by AI or other humans but assign lower scores to the responses they believe to be AI-generated. As for strategic capabilities, while ChatGPT shows a clear ability to adjust its moves in a strategic game to the play of the opponent, humans are, on average, more successful in this adaptation.
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Much research on GenAI and its promise for creativity tends to be about singular, relatively short tasks that are mostly unconstrained.
“Much research on GenAI and its promise for creativity tends to be about singular, relatively short tasks that are mostly unconstrained (e.g., write a poem on some topic and in a certain style, generate alternative uses, provide a list of ideas).”
From The Impact of Generative AI on Creativity in Software Development: A Research Agenda (2025) · cites this paper as [17]
Some studies show GenAI outperforming humans on creative tasks.
“Other studies show GenAI outperforming humans. Consultants using GenAI [30] produced more than 40% higher quality solutions in a controlled study, where quality was an aggregate score comprising creativity, analytical thinking, writing proficiency, and persuasiveness.”
From The Impact of Generative AI on Creativity in Software Development: A Research Agenda (2025) · cites this paper as [17]
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The Impact of Generative AI on Creativity in Software Development: A Research Agenda
Jackson, V., Vasilescu, B., Russo, D., Ralph, P., Prikladnicki, R., Izadi, M., D’Angelo, S., Inman, S., Andrade, A., & van der Hoek, A. (2025) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/3708523 · Cited by 23
Generative AI and Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis
Holzner, N., Maier, S., & Feuerriegel, S. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.17241 · Cited by 143
Metadata
- Authors
- Bohren, N., Hakimov, R., & Lalive, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Lausanne (CH)
- WZB Berlin Social Science Center (DE)
- Ifo Institute for Economic Research (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Bohren, Noah
- Venue
- SSRN Electronic Journal
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024
- ISSN
- 1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4402728132
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (207722, 100018)
- Université de Lausanne
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence Applications
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Keywords
- generative AI, ChatGPT, Google Bard, human-AI comparison, creativity, strategic thinking, human-AI collaboration, gender differences, strategic games, large language models
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