Creativity in the AI Era: Humans vs. ChatGPT in Unprompted Playful Language Tasks

Abstract

Creativity is undergoing significant transformation with the growing adoption of AI-powered text generation tools like ChatGPT. Nowadays, teachers are faced with pseudo-creativity scenarios where students can use AI to produce texts of various kinds and present them as if they were their own. To envision the future of creativity in the AI era, it is important to reflect on what creativity was like in the pre-ChatGPT era, what aspects of creativity might be affected in the AI era, and whether AI can compete with humans in demonstrating unprompted playful language use even in a mundane ordinary task. In this paper, I revisited a past pedagogical task employed with students in the pre-ChatGPT era and compared their behaviour with ChatGPT’s performance. The task involves filling in a missing line in partially incomplete texts and reflecting on the process involved. The findings show that although ChatGPT’s responses could mimic students’ responses regarding exploratory creativity, the ability to demonstrate unprompted transformational creativity (a higher form of creativity) is observed only in human responses. Despite producing similar outcomes, the processes underlying students’ responses differ, shaped by their unique personal, socio-cultural and emotional experiences and different thinking styles. While both students and ChatGPT show cognitive fixation at an individual level, students as a group display a variety of thinking styles, reflecting collective diversity. Improper use of AI tools such as ChatGPT can result in collective novelty decay and deprive us of valuable cognitive opportunities to reflect on, draw from, and reshape our personal, emotional and socio-cultural experiences and to engage in unprompted creativity when performing a language task.

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