Humans as Creativity Gatekeepers: Are We Biased Against AI Creativity?

Abstract

With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly involved in the creation of organizational and commercial artifacts, human evaluators’ role as creativity gatekeepers of AI-produced artifacts will become critical for innovation processes. However, when humans evaluate creativity, their judgment is clouded by biases triggered by the characteristics of the creator. Drawing from folk psychology and algorithm aversion research, we examine whether the identity of the producer of a given artifact as artificial intelligence (AI) or human is a source of bias affecting people’s creativity evaluation of such artifact and what drives this effect. With four experimental studies (N = 2039), of which two were pre-registered, using different experimental designs and evaluation targets, we found that people sometimes—but not always—ascribe lower creativity to a product when they are told that the producer is an AI rather than a human. In addition, we found that people consistently perceive generative AI to exert less effort than humans in the creation of a given artifact, which drives the lower creativity ratings ascribed to generative AI producers. We discuss the implication of these findings for organizational creativity and innovation in the context of human-AI interaction.