Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content

Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) -- including ever more powerful large language models (LLMs) -- holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI ideas on the production of a short story in an online experimental study where some writers could obtain story ideas from a GenAI platform. We find that access to GenAI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However, GenAI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: with GenAI, individual writers are better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content may be produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity.