Creative or Uncreative Partner: Comparing Humans and AI in Collaborative Creative Tasks

Creativity is fundamentally a collaborative process. Yet as generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into creative work, understanding how AI reshapes collaboration has become critical. This pre-registered study directly compares human-human and human-AI collaboration dynamics across two creative tasks: the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) and creative short story writing. Participants were randomly assigned to pairs in either human-human (N = 68 pairs) or human-AI (GPT-4o; N = 72 pairs) conditions, with partners alternating turns as first responders to examine how initiation order shapes the creative process over time. Our findings reveal that the apparent "AI advantage" in creative collaboration is illusory, driven primarily by increased AI verbosity rather than enhanced creativity. Critically, collaboration with AI partners negatively impacted humans' own creative responses compared to human-human partnerships, with human-AI collaboration failing to enhance idea originality or diversity relative to human-human collaboration. Human partners demonstrated superior collaborative effectiveness that strengthened over time, indicating that current generative AI systems, while producing more verbose outputs, do not replicate the collective creativity characteristic of human-human collaboration. These results challenge assumptions about AI’s creative potential, with direct implications for AI system design and collaborative creative practice.