The Creativity Showdown: Humans Still Outperform AI

Despite AI’s rapid progress in generating visually stunning artwork, human creativity—shaped by experience, emotions, and intent—still gives professional artists an edge. But as AI advances, could machines soon rival human artistic intuition?

Research: Beyond the brush: Human versus artificial intelligence creativity in the realm of generative art. Image Credit: Anton Vierietin / Shutterstock

In the rapidly developing contest between human creativity and artificial intelligence algorithms, professional artists still have an edge in producing more creative AI-assisted artwork than the AI programs themselves or novice artists, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. 

The rapid advancement of AI raises some existential questions about the nature of creativity, said lead researcher Paul Seli, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. 

"Creativity has long been considered a uniquely human ability that is tied to personal experiences, emotions and the drive to communicate meaning," he said. "But now that AI can generate complex, aesthetically compelling artwork, we have to ask if human creativity still holds a distinct edge or is AI fundamentally changing the way we think about creative expression?"

According to the study findings published online in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, professional artists still have the upper hand, at least for now. 

The researchers selected 15 professional artists with more than five years of experience and 15 people with little or no artistic training. All of the participants wrote prompts of up to 15 words each, which were entered into the DALL-E 3 AI program to generate artwork images. 

The same instructions for creating a prompt were also entered 15 times in the ChatGPT AI program to create prompts that were also used to generate artwork images in DALL-E 3. 

Another group of 299 online participants viewed all 45 of the generated artwork images and rated them on creativity. Artwork created with prompts by professional artists was rated as significantly more creative than the AI-generated artwork, followed by the novice artists' work in last place. 

Additional analysis found that the professional artists and the ChatGPT program used more words in their prompts, which could help generate more creative artwork. 

The professional artists also used words in their prompts that were significantly higher in semantic distance than ChatGPT, followed by the novice artists. Semantic distance in this study meant the words used in a prompt were not commonly seen as related to each other, and semantic distance has been linked to creativity in previous studies. For example, one prompt from a professional artist stated: "A madman trapped in a straitjacket made of toilet paper." By contrast, a prompt from a novice artist stated: "A frog using a leaf as an umbrella."

"Whether AI is truly 'creative' depends on how we define creativity," Seli said. "AI undeniably generates images and other outputs that people perceive as creative. But if creativity is tied to human experience, emotions and intentionality, then AI appears to fall short." 

The professional and novice artists had no experience using AI image generators, so their creativity ratings might have been higher if they had had more experience with the AI program or had had the opportunity to edit their prompts to fine-tune the digital images. 

While the professional artists fared well in this study, Seli said, the tables could soon be turned as AI programs at exponential rates.

"If AI becomes better at understanding artistic intent or mimicking human-like intuition, the gap between AI and professional artists could narrow or even disappear," he said. "However, it's possible that the uniquely human aspects of creativity - such as emotional depth and lived experience - will continue to set human artists apart. Whether that distinction matters in the long run remains an open question. Only time will tell."