Claire Stevenson

Vijeta Deshpande, Namrata Shivagunde, Sherin Muckatira et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being applied to increasingly difficult problems and use cases. To navigate their vast solution spaces effectively, LLMs need to be creative. Yet the subjective nature of creativity and the limits of human judgment make training LLMs for creativity especially challenging. As a solution, we train LLMs on Codenames, a word-association game that exercises the two central axes of creativity, divergent and convergent thinking, while yielding objectively verifiable outcomes. This verifiability lets us bypass human judgment and train with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We train Qwen3-1.7B, 4B, and 8B models and evaluate them on ten creativity and four reasoning benchmarks. We find that the precision-diversity trade-off is scale-dependent: the 8B model prioritizes creativity over precision, while the 1.7B and 4B models gain reasoning precision at the cost of creativity. Concretely, the 8B model shows modest but consistent creativity gains (8 of 10 benchmarks) with only minor reasoning degradation, whereas the smaller models achieve substantial gains on reasoning tasks. Our study presents a scalable and effective solution to train LLMs for creativity.

Claire Stevenson, Iris Smal, Matthijs Baas et al.

AI large language models have (co-)produced amazing written works from newspaper articles to novels and poetry. These works meet the standards of the standard definition of creativity: being original and useful, and sometimes even the additional element of surprise. But can a large language model designed to predict the next text fragment provide creative, out-of-the-box, responses that still solve the problem at hand? We put Open AI's generative natural language model, GPT-3, to the test. Can it provide creative solutions to one of the most commonly used tests in creativity research? We assessed GPT-3's creativity on Guilford's Alternative Uses Test and compared its performance to previously collected human responses on expert ratings of originality, usefulness and surprise of responses, flexibility of each set of ideas as well as an automated method to measure creativity based on the semantic distance between a response and the AUT object in question. Our results show that -- on the whole -- humans currently outperform GPT-3 when it comes to creative output. But, we believe it is only a matter of time before GPT-3 catches up on this particular task. We discuss what this work reveals about human and AI creativity, creativity testing and our definition of creativity.

Surabhi S. Nath, Peter Dayan, Claire Stevenson

Large language models appear quite creative, often performing on par with the average human on creative tasks. However, research on LLM creativity has focused solely on \textit{products}, with little attention on the creative \textit{process}. Process analyses of human creativity often require hand-coded categories or exploit response times, which do not apply to LLMs. We provide an automated method to characterise how humans and LLMs explore semantic spaces on the Alternate Uses Task, and contrast with behaviour in a Verbal Fluency Task. We use sentence embeddings to identify response categories and compute semantic similarities, which we use to generate jump profiles. Our results corroborate earlier work in humans reporting both persistent (deep search in few semantic spaces) and flexible (broad search across multiple semantic spaces) pathways to creativity, where both pathways lead to similar creativity scores. LLMs were found to be biased towards either persistent or flexible paths, that varied across tasks. Though LLMs as a population match human profiles, their relationship with creativity is different, where the more flexible models score higher on creativity. Our dataset and scripts are available on \href{https://github.com/surabhisnath/Creative_Process}{GitHub}.

Mete Ismayilzada, Claire Stevenson, Lonneke van der Plas

Story-writing is a fundamental aspect of human imagination, relying heavily on creativity to produce narratives that are novel, effective, and surprising. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate high-quality stories, their creative story-writing capabilities remain under-explored. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of creativity in short story generation across 60 LLMs and 60 people using a five-sentence cue-word-based creative story-writing task. We use measures to automatically evaluate model- and human-generated stories across several dimensions of creativity, including novelty, surprise, diversity, and linguistic complexity. We also collect creativity ratings and Turing Test classifications from non-expert and expert human raters and LLMs. Automated metrics show that LLMs generate stylistically complex stories, but tend to fall short in terms of novelty, surprise and diversity when compared to average human writers. Expert ratings generally coincide with automated metrics. However, LLMs and non-experts rate LLM stories to be more creative than human-generated stories. We discuss why and how these differences in ratings occur, and their implications for both human and artificial creativity.