Generative AI is reshaping how cultural artifacts are produced and disseminated, thereby challenging our notion of creativity. The scholarly debate over whether these tools enrich or diminish culture often stems from conflating two separate dimensions of creativity: novelty, which belongs to individual artifacts, and diversity, which characterizes populations. We argue that, in the context of generative AI, creativity should be regarded as a property of hybrid collectives—populations where people and algorithms interact—rather than of isolated individuals.
AI‑assisted ideation consistently raises the novelty of single outputs but tends to narrow overall diversity. This is not an inevitable consequence of involving machines. Because humans and models explore solution spaces in complementary ways, mixed groups can outperform and out‑diversify groups composed solely of either humans or algorithms, and machine‑discovered solutions can enter human culture and persist. The decisive factor is composition: which agents are present, their proportions, and how they are connected. The question thus shifts from whether AI helps or harms creativity to which mixtures allow individual gains to accumulate without eroding collective diversity.
Review