Chatbots 'outperform most humans' at creative thinking

Researchers have found that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are capable of a skill known as divergent thinking - a spontaneous thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.

When assessed with a type of divergent thinking exercise known as alternate uses tasks, which asks a person to think of as many uses as possible for a simple object, chatbots, on average, performed better than humans.

However, the researchers also found that the best human ideas still matched or exceeded those that came from AI.

Simone Grassini, associate professor in the department of psychosocial science at the University of Bergen, and Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience Lab at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, told the PA news agency: "Indeed, this is a remarkable type of ability that AI chatbots display.

"The findings show that AI is better than most humans in creative thinking.

"But we should also remember that we used the divergent thinking task to measure creative thinking, that is, measuring a particular type of creative thinking and not creativity in general.

"Our results show that, at least for now, the best humans still outperform the AI."

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, Prof Grassini and her colleague Mika Koivisto, of the department of psychology at the University of Turku, in Turku, Finland, assigned alternate uses tasks for four objects - a rope, a box, a pencil and a candle - to 256 human volunteers and three AI chatbots - ChatGPT3, ChatGPT4, and Copy.Ai.

The responses were rated on semantic distance - looking at how closely related the response was to the object's original use - and creativity.

The team said that on average, chatbot-generated responses scored significantly higher than the human responses for both semantic distance and creativity.

The best human response outperformed each chatbot's best response in seven out of eight scoring categories - however responses from people had a higher proportion of poor-quality ideas, the researchers added.

"Playing around with ChatGPT, I noticed that some of the answers given by the chatbot displayed a good level of creativity," Prof Grassini said.

"I knew that the chatbot would have performed well, but I think it performed even better than what I expected."

The researchers said that while their work highlights the potential of AI as a tool to enhance creativity, it also underscores the unique and complex nature of human creativity that may be difficult to fully replicate or surpass with AI technology.

"It is still to be established whether these capabilities of AI will translate directly on AI systems, replacing human jobs that require creative thinking," Prof Grassini said.

"I prefer to think that AI will be helping humans to improve their capacity."

Australian Associated Press