Creative and Strategic Capabilities of Generative Ai: Evidence from Large-Scale Experiments

40 Pages Posted: 23 Sep 2024 Last revised: 24 Sep 2024

See all articles by Noah Bohren

Noah Bohren

University of Lausanne

Rustamdjan Hakimov

WZB Berlin Social Science Center; University of Lausanne

Rafael Lalive

University of Lausanne - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made substantial progress, but its full capabilities remain unclear, and we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how people augment productivity with AI and perceive AI-generated outputs. This study compares the ability of AI to a representative population of US adults in creative and strategic tasks. The creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative than those created by humans. Moreover, ChatGPT is substantially more creative than humans, while Bard lags behind. Augmenting humans with AI improves human creativity, albeit not as much as ideas created by ChatGPT alone. Competition from AI does not significantly reduce the creativity of men, but it decreases the creativity of women. Humans who rate the text cannot discriminate well between ideas created by AI or other humans but assign lower scores to the responses they believe to be AI-generated. As for strategic capabilities, while ChatGPT shows a clear ability to adjust its moves in a strategic game to the play of the opponent, humans are, on average, more successful in this adaptation.

Keywords: creativity, ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, strategic skill, experiment, algorithm-aversion

JEL Classification: I24, J24, D91, C90

Suggested Citation

Bohren, Noah and Hakimov, Rustamdjan and Hakimov, Rustamdjan and Lalive, Rafael, Creative and Strategic Capabilities of Generative Ai: Evidence from Large-Scale Experiments. IZA Discussion Paper No. 17302, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4963992

Noah Bohren (Contact Author)

University of Lausanne ( email )

Rustamdjan Hakimov

WZB Berlin Social Science Center ( email )

Reichpietschufer 50
D-10785 Berlin, 10785
Germany

University of Lausanne ( email )

Quartier Chambronne
Lausanne, 1016
Switzerland

Rafael Lalive

University of Lausanne - Department of Economics ( email )

Batiment Internef
Lausanne, 1015
Switzerland

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

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