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An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity

Nature Human Behaviour (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

This paper investigates the potential of ChatGPT for helping humans tackle problems that require creativity. Across five experiments, we asked participants to use ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) to generate creative ideas for various everyday and innovation-related problems, including choosing a creative gift for a teenager, making a toy, repurposing unused items and designing an innovative dining table. We found that using ChatGPT increased the creativity of the generated ideas compared with not using any technology or using a conventional Web search (Google). This effect remained robust regardless of whether the problem required consideration of many (versus few) constraints and whether it was viewed as requiring empathetic concern. Furthermore, ChatGPT was most effective at generating incrementally (versus radically) new ideas. Process evidence suggests that the positive influence of ChatGPT can be attributed to its capability to combine remotely related concepts into a cohesive form, leading to a more articulate presentation of ideas.

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Fig. 1: Process evidence.

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Data availability

All data, including the secondary dataset and the experiments, can be found in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rzn87/.

Code availability

The corresponding code can be found in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rzn87/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Byung Cheol Lee, Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marketing, Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Byung Cheol Lee

  2. Department of Marketing, Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung

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  1. Byung Cheol Lee
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Contributions

B.C.L. and J.C. engaged in idea generation, designed and performed research, analysed data and wrote the paper together.

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Correspondence to Byung Cheol Lee.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Fabricio Góes, Max Kreminski and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes A–K, Fig. 1, Tables 1–3 and references.

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Lee, B.C., Chung, J.(. An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity. Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01953-1

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