The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving

Abstract

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative
problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a
crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business ideas and assessed the novelty,
value, and creativity of solutions created by both the human crowd and the collaborative efforts of one
human and AI. The challenge attracted 125 global solvers from various industries and the human-prompted
AI solutions were generated using strategic prompt engineering. We recruited 300 evaluators to judge a
randomized selection of 13 out of 234 solutions, totaling 3,900 evaluator–solution pairs. Our findings
demonstrate that the solutions generated through human-AI collaboration matched the creativity of those
from the human solvers. Whereas the human-AI solutions provided more value, the human-only solutions
were more innovative—both on average and for highly novel outcomes. Our study explores the potential
for incorporating “AI-in-the-loop” into creative problem-solving, offering a scalable and cost-efficient
method for enhancing the early phases of innovation. Our research paves the way for future exploration of
how AI can be integrated into creative processes to foster more effective innovation.

Keywords: Generative AI, ChatGPT, LLMs, innovation, crowdsourcing, idea generation, evaluation, novelty, value