AI Is More Creative Than You. Well, Actually...
A 100,000-person study shows AI beats the average human at creativity. But not actual creative people. That distinction matters.
"AI surpasses humans in creativity!" You've probably seen that headline. It's scary. It's clickable. It's also misleading, because the study behind it tells a far more interesting story. And a far more useful one.
The study everyone's talking about (wrong)
In January 2026, researchers from the University of Montreal, University of Toronto, and Mila (co-founded by Yoshua Bengio) published the largest-ever study on human versus AI creativity in Scientific Reports (Nature group). 100,000 human participants, balanced for age and gender. The test: the DAT (Divergent Association Task). Name 10 words as different from each other as possible. "Galaxy, fork, nostalgia, hurricane": good score. "Cat, dog, hamster, rabbit": bad score. The researchers ran the same test on GPT, Claude, Gemini, and several other models.
Beating the average, not the outliers
GPT-4 beats the average human. But 50% of humans outperform every AI model tested. Every single one. And the higher you climb in the rankings, the wider the gap gets. Professor Karim Jerbi: "I really want to emphasize the word 'average,' because they didn't surpass all humans. If you're in the top 10% most creative, you maintain an advantage."
The word "ocean" and creativity on repeat
GPT-4 uses the word "ocean" in 90% of its responses. "Microscope" appears in 70%. "Elephant" in 60%. Humans? The most frequent word is "Car," at 1.4%. AI keeps returning to the same corners of its statistical memory.
Creating without knowing it
Jerbi: "What does this tell us about creativity? Does it require some form of consciousness?" He's talking about agency: the capacity to decide intentionally. AI doesn't do any of that. It calculates the next most probable sequence of words, plus a little statistical noise.
Creativity as a volume knob
An LLM calculates the next most likely term. Temperature adds randomness. Low temperature: reliable but predictable. Turn it up: more varied, but the word rankings never change. Too high: the output becomes gibberish. In humans, creativity emerges from connections between experiences, emotions, obsessions. In AI: a decimal between 0 and 2.
What this means for you
Jay Olson, co-author: "These models feel creative when you use them, but a good portion of people can do better." If you're among those who beat AI at creativity (statistically, one in two people), outsourcing your creative thinking to ChatGPT is shooting yourself in the foot. The real risk isn't that AI replaces your creativity. It's that you stop being creative because you handed everything to it.
Take the test
The DAT test is free and takes two minutes: datcreativity.com. Find 10 words as different as possible.
