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According to research reported in the Journal of Creative Behavior on Nov. 11, the supposed “creativity” shown by artificial intelligence (AI) is subject to strict mathematical constraints.
David Cropley, an engineering innovation professor at the University of South Australia and the study’s only author, concluded that AI’s capabilities are limited to a zone between the beginner and expert levels in human beings, suggesting AI will never eclipse the creative talent of the most skilled human artists.
However, Cropley’s conclusion hasn’t done much to quell worries that AI could cause creative sectors of the economy to vanish. Specialists are still debating the creative capacity of AI, and one of the biggest obstacles is the definition of creativity itself. Similar to “smart” or “attractive,” “creative” is a strikingly human term that can signify different concepts in diverse fields, and that opposes precise or quantitative evaluation.
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Cropley used the Standard Definition of Creativity to examine the output of various large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. According to a statement, he found that “even though AI can simulate creative actions — quite convincingly at times — its actual creative power is limited to the equivalent of an average person and can never attain professional or expert levels given current design guidelines.”
AI is not human
According to Jack Shaw of Shawfire Media, an e-commerce strategist who employs and evaluates LLMs to create and test marketing material, the study’s assertion is valid under some definitions. “Humans take the lead if creativity entails rethinking a brief, establishing novel cultural indicators, and taking accountability for high-risk choices that could backfire. Models combine patterns optimized for probability; they don’t have motivations, lived understanding, or interests, and they don’t come up with aims.”
Alesha Brown, founder and CEO of Fruition Publishing Concierge Services and Alesha Brown Productions, firms that assist authors, thought leaders, and brands in transforming lived experiences into books, films, and campaigns, noted that the biggest shortcoming in AI’s creativity is that it will never have a human experience.
“No LLM awakens with a childhood trauma, a cultural ancestry, or a moral dilemma and decides, ‘I’m going to create a film or write a book that may jeopardize my relationships but could set others free’,” she stated. “That ‘why’ underlying the project — the eagerness to risk reputation, income, or belonging for an idea — is a significant component of what we instinctively recognize as creativity, and AI lacks that. It’s an argument centered around agency and depth, as opposed to a conclusive mathematical demonstration that AI can never match or surpass us.”
But AI is creative
However, by other yardsticks, AI can be considered creative. Gor Gasparyan, co-founder and CEO of Passionate Agency, a digital intelligence agency offering digital experiences with a focus on AI engineering, believes that the notion of a mathematical constraint on AI creativity is rooted in an outdated definition of the term that undervalues the significance of novelty.
“In my experience, AI models generate keyword and theme connections that our human SEO specialists find novel in 80% of cases, leading to content strategies that haven’t been previously considered,” Gasparyan stated.
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To Iliya Rybchin, founder and principal of AI consulting firm Vorpal Hedge, AI produces creative materials in a manner quite similar to that of humans. “Humans and LLMs both depend on the same fundamental mechanism — recombining stored patterns under constraints. The actual issue isn’t that AI ‘lacks creativity’; it’s that we persist in portraying creativity in a mystical way that collapses as soon as we observe how human creators actually function,” he remarked.
“We romanticize the image of the novelist staring at a blank page or the chef imagining a dish that nobody has ever thought of before,” he clarified — but talented creators draw upon their past experiences, having sampled various cuisines, read multiple works of literature, and learned skills that they then blend into novel variations.“None of this is creation from nothing; it’s high-fidelity remixing. In reality, creativity is almost exclusively combinatorics.”
He added that the assertion that AI has a mathematical ceiling lower than humans is a math mistake. “If creativity is the capacity to link unconnected dots, the entity with the most dots wins.”
James Lei, CEO of legal class action platform Sparrow, suggested that this concept explains why AI may replicate human creativity. “Creativity is production along with selection based on a purpose,” he remarked. “Production is the capacity to generate numerous candidates, whereas creativity necessitates novelty, utility, and acceptance by an audience or domain regulators. AI already functions for advertising concepts, onboarding flows, contract clause options, and musical motifs, where quality can be assessed and the brief gives a direction, which is why this is the case.”
You get out what you put in
Some specialists hold that AI’s perceived limitations are exclusively the result of a lack of input from humans. Lei adds that if you can issue clear instructions, define strategies to evaluate results, and maintain constant enhancements through human feedback and testing, for example, AI meets the standard because it generates novel alternatives and the procedure retains those that add value. “It falters in open-ended, long-term agenda-setting that incorporates lived experience, embodied context, and cross-domain judgment.”
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Amit Raj, founder of The Links Guy, an SEO consultancy utilizing AI processes in content marketing tasks, mentioned that obscure prompts may also result in AI creating a somewhat uninspired concept. “However, if you give it context, challenge it, polish it, and discuss it, then creativity appears.”
In the end, the definition of creativity will continue to change as long as the discussion over AI’s creative talent persists, according to Paul DeMott, Chief Technology Officer at Helium SEO. “The argument that generating something isn’t equivalent to being creative demonstrates that we’re moving the goalposts,” he remarked. “Critics claimed AI had no intent, then no emotional depth, then no originality. We define creativity as anything that people can do that machines can’t, then redefine it when machines break that barrier.”
Drew Turney
Drew is a freelance technology and science reporter with two decades of experience. Growing up with aspirations of revolutionizing the world, he later found that writing about individuals who are doing so was simpler. Having expertise in science and technology for many years, he’s covered a wide array of topics ranging from evaluations of the newest smartphones to comprehensive analyses of data centers, cloud computing, security, AI, mixed reality, and more.
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