Strict mathematical limits are placed on the supposed “creativity” of artificial intelligence (AI), according to a study published Nov. 11 in the Journal of Creative Behavior.
David Cropley, Professor of Engineering Innovation at the University of South Australia and sole author of the study, found that the limits of AI’s capabilities lie between the amateur and professional levels of humans, meaning that AI will never surpass the creativity of the most talented human artists.
But Cropley’s findings did little to allay fears that AI will wipe out creative sectors of the economy. Experts continue to debate the creative potential of AI, and one of the biggest hurdles is how to define creativity. Like “smart” or “charming”, “creative” is a very human descriptor that can mean different things in different areas and defies easy or quantitative measurement.
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Cropley applied a standard definition of creativity to the output of various large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. He found that “while AI can imitate creative behavior, sometimes quite convincingly, its actual creative ability is limited to the level of the average human, and current design principles will never reach professional or expert standards,” according to the statement.
AI is not human
Jack Shaw of Shawfire Media, an e-commerce strategist who implements and benchmarks LLMs to generate and test marketing content, said that under some definitions, the study’s claims are true. “If creativity means reconfiguring the brief, setting new cultural cues, and taking responsibility for risky choices that can go wrong, then humans are in charge. Models synthesize patterns that are optimized for probability. They do not include intention, lived context, stakes, and do not generate goals.”
The biggest gap in AI creativity is that AI will never have a human experience, said Alesha Brown, founder and CEO of Fruition Publishing Concierge Services and Alesha Brown Productions, a company that helps authors, thought leaders, and brands turn lived experiences into books, films, and campaigns.
“There are no LLMs who wake up with childhood traumas, cultural lineages, and moral conflicts and decide, ‘I’m going to make a movie or write a book that might sacrifice relationships, but might liberate other people,'” she said. “That ‘why’ behind the work, the willingness to risk reputation, income, and belonging for an idea, is a big part of what we intuitively consider creativity, but AI doesn’t have that. This is a discussion about agency and depth, not an ironclad mathematical proof that AI can never match or surpass us.”
But AI is creative
But other benchmarks suggest that AI is creative. Go Gasparyan, co-founder and CEO of Passionate Agency, a digital intelligence agency that provides digital experiences focused on AI engineering, believes the idea of mathematical limits to AI creativity is based on an archaic definition of the word that downplays the value of newness.
“In my practice, AI models generate keyword and theme associations that are novel to human SEO professionals 80% of the time, leading to content strategies that have not been considered before,” says Gasparian.
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For Iliya Rybchin, founder and president of AI consulting firm Vorpal Hedge, AI generates creative materials in a very similar way to humans. “Humans and LLMs both rely on the same underlying mechanism of recombining stored patterns under constraints. The real problem is not that AI is ‘uncreative,’ but that it continues to package creativity in a mystical language that quickly falls apart when we see how human creators actually work,” he said.
“We romanticize novelists staring at a blank page or chefs coming up with dishes no one has ever imagined. But talented creators taste food, read literature, learn skills, draw on lived experience and recombine it into new variations. “None of this is a proto-nihilo creation, but a high-fidelity remix. In fact, creativity is almost exclusively combinational.”
He added that the claim that AI has a lower mathematical ceiling than humans is a mathematical fallacy. “If creativity is the ability to connect unconnected dots, then the entity with the most dots wins.”
This principle is why AI can match human creativity, said James Lei, CEO of legal class action platform Sparrow. “Creativity is purposeful generation and selection,” he said. “Generation is the ability to generate a large pool of candidates, but creativity requires novelty, usefulness, and acceptance by audiences and domain gatekeepers. This is why AI is already at work in advertising concepts, onboarding flows, contract clause options, musical motifs, and more where quality is measurable and easy to direct.”
What you put in comes out
Some experts believe that any perceived shortcomings of AI are solely caused by a lack of human input. For example, if you can give clear instructions, set a way to judge results, and continue to improve through human feedback and testing, AI meets the criteria because it generates new options and the process retains options that add value, Lei added. “What is struggling is setting an open-ended, long-term agenda based on lived experience, embodied context, and transdisciplinary judgment.”
Ambiguous prompts can also cause AI to output very bland ideas, says Amit Raj, founder of The Links Guy, an SEO consultancy that uses AI workflows for content marketing tasks. “But when you give it context, challenge it, refine it, and discuss it, creativity emerges.”
“Ultimately, the definition of creativity will continue to evolve as long as the debate around the creative capabilities of AI continues,” said Paul DeMott, chief technology officer at Helium SEO. “The argument that making something is not equivalent to being creative shows that we are shifting the goalposts,” he says. “Critics have argued that AI lacks intent, then emotional richness, and then originality. We conceptualize creativity as something that humans can achieve that machines cannot, and we redefine creativity when machines break that barrier.”
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