When ChatGPT is gone: Creativity reverts and homogeneity persists

Abstract

ChatGPT has been evidenced to enhance human performance in creative tasks. Yet, it is still unclear if this boosting effect sustains with and without ChatGPT. In a pre-registered seven-day lab experiment and a follow-up survey after 30 days of experiment completion, we examined the impacts of ChatGPT presence and absence on sustained creativity using a text dataset of 3302 creative ideas and 427 creative solutions from 61 college students. Participants in the treatment group used ChatGPT in creative tasks, while those in the control group completed the tasks by themselves. The findings show that although the boosting effect of ChatGPT was consistently observed over a five-day creative journey, human creative performance reverted to baseline when ChatGPT was down on the 7th and the 30th day. More critically, the use of ChatGPT in creative tasks resulted in increasingly homogenized contents, and this homogenization effect persisted even when ChatGPT was absence. These findings pose a challenge to the prevailing argument that ChatGPT can enhance human creativity. In fact, generative AI like ChatGPT lends to human with a temporary rise in creative performance but boxes human creative capability in the long run, highlighting the imperative for cautious generative AI integration in creative endeavors.