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Author: Jill Maschio, PhD

AI is Creative. Will it be at the Cost of Disrupting the Human Psyche?

The creative mind is part of what makes us human and transforms societies. Creativity allows individuals to adapt by solving problems effectively. One’s creativity empowers the individual. Through creativity, people imagine how to solve their daily challenges or issues.

Creativity is what allows people to compose music and invent products that have changed the ways in which we live our lives. For example, Newton invented the lightbulb, the Wright brothers made the first controlled flight, which influenced the field of aviation, and trains were invented through the inventions of wagonways and steam engines.

Without creativity and opportunities to be creative and develop creativity, society may become stagnant, and people lose hope. We don’t know the full ramifications if society at large lets AI do the majority of creating for them.  Let me point out how I see the effects from a psychological point of view.

The Battle for Creativity Between Humans and AI

The AI-generated Drake deep fake went viral before it was pulled for infringement, according to a Forbes article (Uzzi, 2023). The battle for creativity between AI and humans is here and it’s real. The battle for creativity may soon cross into multiple sectors of society, such that as a society, we lose our ability to express our ourselves.

Sir Ken Robinson brings awareness about creativity and why it matters for education. Robinson (2017) explains the problem with creativity is that people can’t seem to define it. He defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value” (10:44). He believes that creative ideas provide value and purpose. The creative individual can be critical of the idea. For example, evaluating whether the idea is possible or a good solution.

For Robinson, imagination is a precursor of creativity. With imagination, we can bring into mind things that are not present to the senses, so imagination allows us to see the world in a new way that we haven’t experienced yet. Robinson explains that creativity is different from imagination, where creativity is applied to imagination.

Robinson goes on to explain that creativity sets us apart from other species and drives cultures, ways of life, and civilization. Thus, it is crucial for education that creativity be included in all curriculums and used by educators to inspire children.

Through creativity, we can also introduce novel ideas that may not have been tested but become logical and our reality.

Maybe some people believe that with AI, we won’t need to be creative because AI will do it for us. My criticism is by doing that, we risk losing our humanness. We often hear about creativity in the context of the arts, but creativity is a significant part of what makes us human and gives us our humanness. Creativity is more than the arts; it is our way of expressing ourselves, helps us develop our sense of self, and guides our thoughts, goals, and ambitions. It paves the way for our lives because when we generate new thoughts and think about something in a new way, that’s creativity; even if the thought isn’t entirely new, you are still engaged in the creative process. 

Considering how to meet a task-specific goal is creative thought (Pinho, et al, 2016). When we contemplate our lives and gain new insight, that’s creativity. Creativity allows us to experience personal growth because each time you have a new thought about how to live your life or about life itself, that’s creativity. When we hear a song on the radio and gain insight into ourselves, that’s creativity.

de Vicente-Yague-Jara et al. (2023) studied creativity between humans and AI – 20 AI, to be exact. The researchers asked both AI and human subjects (university students) to make a list of things a rubber tube could be used for and then to answer what would happen if people never stopped growing. They found that while there were some performance similarities, the AI outperformed the human participants overall based on three criteria: fluency, flexibility, and narrative originality. A limitation of the study is that humans may be more creative in a domain with considerable knowledge and experience, or they may care about it.

While it seems that scientifically, research suggests that AI can help humans be creative, humans prefer the value of being creative rather than handing it over to AI (Pont-Niclos et al., 2024). In a study by Huston (2023), similar results were found. Most students in the study reported feeling that AI improved their academic performance when creating a business website (Hutson, 2023). Students had different answers when asked how AI improved their projects. One student reported how AI was a time saver. Another student commented that AI didn’t improve the final project. In contrast, another student expressed how AI helped the project because the individual didn’t have to spend as much time generating content.

When AI Creates More and Humans Create Less

My answer to the last comment above is that the student missed the value of generating the content and learning from the experience. Each time we let AI create for us, we rob ourselves of the learning that comes with doing, potentially weakening our ability to be creative and innovative. Furthermore, in the real world, a website business freelancer or owner may need to justify the website design to a customer, which the designer may not be able to answer unless the individual used AI to help further develop their ideas in the first place.

Sure, sometimes we need an idea to improve an original idea or make it a reality. We look around, such as on the Internet, for ideas, so using AI, for that matter, allows us to still have control over the thought processes during creativity by using it as a tool. In this aspect, humans are “kept in the loop” because humans are using AI to assist their creativity and not replace it – they are giving their feedback on AI’s creativity (Anantrasirichae & Bull, 2021).

Additionally, research suggests that AI may limit diversity and novelty creative output (Atkinson & Barker, 2023), may lead to more homogenous creative output rather than a wide range of novel content (Doshi & Hauser, 2024), and that AI alone is not sufficient for creative output without human intervention  (Das & Varshney, 2022).

Hindsight will probably guide society in this debate. Society has a bad history of finding the implications after the fact rather than looking at the writing on the wall.  We might know with greater certainty that some areas of the brain might be used less with increased technology usage, such as AI. Over time, that might impact human cognition and our humanness. When a person is creative, it activates multiple regions of the brain. The multiple activation may partly be due to individuals reassessing and regenerating the original idea (Liu et al., 2015). Furthermore, when engaged in the creative process, there may be a strong correlation with cognitive control, according to the match filter hypothesis for cognitive control by Chrysikou and colleagues (2014).

The default network and the executive control network are perhaps the two most widely used networks activated during the creative process (Beaty et al.,  2016). The default network is a group of brain regions most active when doing processes such as daydreaming, self-reflection, and thinking about yourself. The default network may function to retrieve episodic memory (previous experiences) (Beaty). The executive network is most active during tasks that require focused attention, such as goal-direct behavior. It includes regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex. Another interesting factor is that the brain is good at activating these networks and having the default and executive networks work together and in conjunction with the regions in the brain.

Keep Our Creativeness

Why is keeping our creativity vital? Studies indicate that creativity is declining in the US (Kim, 2011), and yet a need emphasized by employers as a top necessary skill (Childcreativitylab, n.d). Children have become “less expressive, less energetic and less verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle” (childcreativitylab.org, para. 2).

While the decline in cognition is complex, and there are many possible connections, we can’t overlook the adverse effects of living in a digital world on the human brain, perhaps like a slowly dripping faucet. Will society recognize the effects so that changes can be made for humans and AI to coexist? If we don’t allow the brain time to process information and self-reflect, we miss the opportunity to learn from our experiences—which is needed to birth creative thought that helps direct life’s path.

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