Using AI Critically to Boost, not Curb Creativity

Rebecca G. Kaplan, PhD

Erie High School Librarian

https://shorturl.at/QytKV

Think about how you’ve used AI this week.

• Did you take what you read at face value?
• Did you question it?
• Did you ask follow up questions?
• What did you do before?
• What did you do next?

• Reflect for 1 minute, jot down thoughts

• Turn and talk

“AI is a tool, not a truth machine. Your critical thinking skills are the most important part of the job.”

• NCWIT Counsel for Computing

Take 2 minutes to skim this document

What’s one takeaway that seems useful from the AI Detectives resource.

Why?

Take 1 minute to jot down thoughts

Share out

Has AI boosted or reduced your creativity?

Why do some people boost creativity with AI, while others do not?

Let’s look at 3 recent studies to help us consider these 3 questions:

How Can AI Limit Our Creativity?

How Can We Boost Our Creativity Using AI?

How Can AI Limit Our Creativity?

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Let’s try an experiment

Invent a toy using a fan and a brick.

-(Nature Human Behavior, 2025)

What are some inventions you thought of?

Would AI have done better?

“Build-a-Breeze Castle”

94% of the AI-assisted ideas overlapped significantly. Remarkably, nine different participants independently submitted the exact same name—"Build-a-Breeze Castle"—proving that while AI can generate individual "creative" ideas, it often pushes entire groups toward the same predictable, "average" concepts

While ChatGPT improves the quality of individual ideas, it also leads groups to generate more similar ideas, reducing the variety that’s essential for breakthrough innovation.

-Knowledge at Wharton (Murray, 2025)

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“If you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other.”

-Knowledge at Wharton (Murray, 2025)

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“The researchers caution against mistaking fluency for originality. The best ideas, it seems, are still born from disagreement, divergence, and a bit of creative mess.”

-Knowledge at Wharton (Murray, 2025)

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What’s the takeaway?

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Jot down ideas

Turn and talk

How can we boost our creativity using AI?

Let’s try another experiment

Write down 10 nouns that differ from each other semantically as much as possible.

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You will have 2 minutes.

Divergent Association Task (DAT)

-Nature (Uzzi, 2026)

How did you do?

• Were your nouns all substantially different from each other?
• How did you approach it?
• Do you think AI could have done better? Why?

-Nature (Uzzi, 2026)

Turn and talk

Most participants assume that if they ask a bot to perform this test, it will outperform them.

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On average, bot and human scores are about the same.

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-Nature (Uzzi, 2026)

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The bot proposes two steps:

1. 1. Think of ten word categories — transportation, electronics, mammals and so on.
2. 2. Pick one word from each category.
3. ​

This process diminishes thought anchoring and preserves diversity of thought across participants, who each choose different word categories. The innovator and the bot are now partnering.”

-Nature (Uzzi, 2026)

“If participants ask the bot for a process with which to improve their performance, their own scores skyrocket.

Takeaway:

Partnering, or collaborating with AI can boost your creativity if you ask it how you might approach your task.

What’s the takeaway?

Turn and talk

Why do some people boost creativity with AI, while others do not?

Insight from Creativity Research

• -Harvard Business Review (Lu et al., 2026)

“People produce more creative ideas when they have sufficient cognitive job resources.

These have 2 key elements:

1. Information and knowledge
2. The opportunity to adjust work methods and tasks, such as switching between complex and simple tasks and taking mental breaks.”

How AI Can help

• -Harvard Business Review (Lu et al., 2026)

“Generative AI can increase cognitive job resources in 2 key ways:

• By expanding knowledge

(enabling them to integrate insights across domains)

• Freeing mental capacity

(when AI handles tasks such a summarizing texts, managing data, and drafting content, it reduces employees’ cognitive overload, allowing them to redirect resources to complex problem solving)”

Why wouldn’t these resources help all individuals equally?

• -Harvard Business Review (Lu et al., 2026)

It has to do with metacognition:

• the ability to
• plan,
• evaluate,
• monitor, and
• refine thinking

Why wouldn’t these resources help all individuals equally?

• -Harvard Business Review (Lu et al., 2026)

“People with strong metacognition usually think through the steps to perform a task, keep track of how effective their approach is, and adjust when they notice a lack of progress… They can better understand what information they need and when to shift gears or take breaks to disrupt fixed thinking patterns and restore cognitive capacity.

People low in metacognition are more likely to accept AI’s first answer, rely on default outputs, and fail to check whether AI’s suggestions are accurate or relevant”

What’s the takeaway?

What’s the takeaway?

“The central question for leaders, therefore, is not whether employees use AI, but whether they have the metacognitive skills to engage with it thoughtfully and strategically – turning AI’s suggestions into creative insights.”

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Why do some people boost creativity with AI, while others do not?

How Can AI Limit Our Creativity?

How Can We Boost Our Creativity Using AI?

Now what?

How can you incorporate what we’ve learned into what you do next with AI?

Reach out to collaborate any time!!

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Rebecca G. Kaplan, PhD

kaplanrg@gmail.com