I poured myself three fingers of the cheap stuff—the kind that burns the throat just enough to remind you that you’re still alive—and stared at the glowing screen. The headline was staring back at me like a landlord waiting for rent money. Researchers at the Université de Montréal, backed by the big guns like Yoshua Bengio, ran a massive study. They pitted the best AI models against 100,000 human beings to see who had more creative juice.
The results are in, and if you consider yourself a strictly “average” thinker, you might want to grab a drink too. The machines won.
According to the study published in Scientific Reports, generative AI systems like GPT-4 have officially surpassed the average human in divergent creativity. That’s the fancy academic term for “coming up with weird, unrelated stuff.” They tested this using something called the Divergent Association Task (DAT). It sounds like a government interrogation technique, but it’s actually just asking someone to list ten words that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
The AI, with its silicon brain and endless database of vocabulary, spat out words like “galaxy, fork, freedom, algae, harmonica.” Meanwhile, the average human probably looked at the ceiling, scratched their nose, and muttered “dog, cat, mouse, cheese.”
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent more than five minutes listening to conversations at a bus stop or a dinner party. Most people aren’t walking around with a head full of velvet hurricanes and quantum nostalgia. They’re thinking about their taxes, or what to cook for dinner, or why their lower back hurts. The bar for “average creativity” is sitting on the floor. It’s not hard for a billion-dollar algorithm to step over it.
But here’s the kicker, and it’s the only reason I haven’t thrown my typewriter (or its digital equivalent) out the window yet. The study found a ceiling. While the robots can easily out-dance the mediocre masses, they still can’t touch the true freaks.
When the researchers looked at the top ten percent of human participants—the real weirdos, the poets, the liars, the people who probably have trouble holding down a steady job because their brains are on fire—the humans won. The gap was massive. The most creative humans are still miles ahead of the best code these tech giants can write.
Professor Karim Jerbi, the guy leading this circus, called the results “unsettling.” I don’t find it unsettling. I find it validating. It means that there is still something messy and chaotic in the human soul that can’t be replicated by predicting the next probable token in a sentence.
The AI can fake it. It can mimic the structure of a haiku or the plot of a movie. The researchers tested that too. They asked the bots and the people to write short stories and plot summaries. Again, the bots beat the average. If you need a plot for a Hallmark movie or a corporate press release, the machine is your guy. But if you want something that bleeds? Something that screams? You still need a human who has had their heart broken or spent a night in a drunk tank.
There’s an interesting technical detail in the study about “temperature.” In AI terms, temperature is a setting you can tweak. Turn it down, and the bot becomes a boring, predictable librarian. It plays it safe. Turn the temperature up, and it starts taking risks, hallucinating, making wild connections. It becomes “creative.”
I looked at my bottle of whiskey. That’s my temperature dial. The more I pour, the higher the temperature goes. The difference is, when I crank my temperature up too high, I don’t just hallucinate creative words; I usually end up making bad phone calls at 3:00 AM. The AI just gives you a weird poem about photosynthesis. It doesn’t have to live with the regret the next morning.
And that’s the crux of it. The study mentions that AI creativity is heavily dependent on the prompt. It needs a human to tell it what to do. “Write a story about a sad clown in space.” It does exactly what it’s told. It has no agency. It has no need to create. It doesn’t write because it’s in pain, or because it’s in love, or because it needs to pay the gas bill. It writes because you hit “Enter.”
Professor Jerbi says we shouldn’t view this as a competition, which is exactly what someone says when the competition is rigged. He suggests AI will be a “powerful tool in the service of human creativity.” An assistant. A muse that doesn’t drink all your beer.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe writers of the future will just be editors, sitting back while the software vomits out ten thousand word variations, picking the ones that suck the least. It sounds efficient. It also sounds incredibly boring. It takes the struggle out of it. And without the struggle, without the staring at the blank page until your eyes bleed, is it really art? Or is it just content?
The study used the DAT to measure creativity because it’s fast—two to four minutes. That’s the world we live in. We want creativity that can be measured in minutes. We want efficiency. The AI is great at that. It’s the ultimate efficient creator. It doesn’t get blocked. It doesn’t get hangovers. It doesn’t get depressed.
But looking at the data, knowing that the top 10 percent of humanity can still out-weird the machine, gives me a grim sense of satisfaction. It means that the madness is still ours. The machine can simulate “divergent thinking,” but it’s just math. It’s probability. It’s rolling dice in a dark room.
When a human connects “velvet” to “hurricane,” there’s a chance they’re remembering the feel of a dress during a storm in 1998. There’s a ghost in the machine for us. For the AI, it’s just vector distances in a high-dimensional space.
So, the robots are smarter than the average guy on the street. Fine. Let them have the middle management jobs. Let them write the instruction manuals and the marketing jingles and the polite emails. Let them be average. Being average was never the goal for anyone with a pulse and a bit of fire in their belly anyway.
I drained the glass. The burn was gone, replaced by that familiar, warm hum. My temperature was rising. I sat there, a biological machine running on ethanol and nicotine, and decided to write this without asking a chatbot for help. It might not be “statistically divergent” enough for the researchers at Université de Montréal, and it probably wouldn’t score high on their little word games.
But at least it’s real. And until the robots can learn to drink bad whiskey and regret their life choices, they’ll never catch up to the ones of us who are truly, desperately creative. We’re safe for now. The average is dead. Long live the weirdos.
Source: Researchers tested AI against 100,000 humans on creativity