Creative or uncreative partner: Comparing humans and AI in collaborative creative tasks

Abstract

: Creativity is fundamentally a collaborative process. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into creative work, understanding how it reshapes collaboration becomes critical. This pre-registered study directly compares human-human and human-AI collaboration dynamics across two creative tasks: the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and creative short story writing. Participants were randomly assigned to pairs in either human-human (N = 68 pairs) or human-AI (GPT-4o; N = 72 pairs) conditions, with partners alternating turns as first responders to examine how initiation order shapes the creative process. Our findings reveal that the apparent "AI advantage" in creative collaboration is illusory, driven primarily by increased AI verbosity rather than enhanced creativity. Critically, collaboration with AI partners negatively impacted humans' own creative responses compared to human-human partnerships, with human-AI collaboration failing to enhance idea originality or diversity relative to human-human collaboration. Human partners demonstrated higher collaborative creativity that strengthened over time, indicating that current generative AI systems, while producing more verbose outputs, do not replicate the collective creativity characteristic of human-human collaboration. These results challenge assumptions about AI’s creative potential, with direct implications for AI system design and collaborative creative practice.