ArticleNature human behaviour2026
A large-scale comparison of divergent creativity in humans and large language models.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Generative AI as an External Cognitive Tool: Cognitive Dependence, AI Literacy, and Perceived Academic Creativity.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- From prohibition to integration: LLMs in scientific publishing.Frontiers in genetics · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human-machine partnerships are increasingly used to address grand societal challenges, yet knowledge of the comparative strengths of humans and machines to innovate is nascent. Here we compare the ability of humans (N = 9,198) and large language models (LLMs, N = 215,542 observations) to generate novel ideas in an established creativity task. We present three key results. First, human creativity on average is slightly higher than that of LLMs. Second, creativity differences are pronounced at the extremes of the distribution, with humans exhibiting greater variability and higher levels of creativity in the right-hand tail of the distribution. Third, attempts to increase the creativity of LLMs through instructing LLMs to take on genius personas or different demographic roles lifted performance up to a threshold beyond which the output became opposite real-life patterns, whereas strategic prompt-engineering efforts yielded mixed to negative results. We discuss the implications of our findings for human-machine collaboration and problem solving.
Indexed as
Identifiers
41436597What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.