AI is making everyone’s ideas the same. Here’s how to stay creative

When everyone’s ideas start to converge

Bashan compared the pattern to computers, which were once expensive and out of reach for many and are now everywhere.

“As the technology propagates, it starts to become ubiquitous instead of something special,” he said. “It will average things up, but eventually it will level everything out.”

Published research suggests AI can narrow the range of ideas people come up with. A Science Advances study of 300 participants from researchers at University College London and the University of Exeter in England found that stories written with AI-generated ideas were rated as more creative, yet were more similar to one another than stories written without AI.

Researchers at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, separately found that responses to standardized creativity tests from a range of commercial AI models were more alike than human responses were.

Bashan thinks one reason may be anchoring, the tendency to be pulled toward whatever frame of reference comes first. When someone asks AI for ideas, the first answer it gives becomes the anchor for their own thinking, and because AI hands many people the same answer, they all begin from the same place.