Fascinating study by Mika Koivisto and Simone Grassini. They tested humans versus GPT3, GPT4, and Copy.ai, to see who performed better in divergent thinking tasks: “Participants were asked to generate uncommon and creative uses for everyday objects.”
To rate the answers, the researchers used two forms of evaluation: (1) “To operationalize originality, we used a computational method to objectively quantify the semantic distance between the object probes and the responses.” (2) “human raters who were blind to the presence of AI-generated responses evaluated the responses. These raters provided a human view of creativity, as it is possible that mere semantic distance may not capture all aspects of creative products that humans consider original or surprising.”
Results
- “On average, the AI chatbots outperformed human participants. While human responses included poor-quality ideas, the chatbots generally produced more creative responses.”
- But “the best human ideas still matched or exceed those of the chatbots.”
Citation
Koivisto, M., Grassini, S. Best humans still outperform artificial intelligence in a creative divergent thinking task. Sci Rep 13, 13601 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40858-3.
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