A Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) webinar explored the dual-edged impact of AI on creativity, featuring researchers from UCL, University of Exeter, and University of Washington. The panel found that while AI boosts individual productivity and raises baseline creative quality — particularly helping less-creative individuals produce more novel and useful work — it simultaneously narrows the overall diversity of ideas. When people start with AI-generated suggestions, they tend to anchor to them, leading to convergent rather than divergent thinking across teams.

The researchers emphasize that collaboration design is critical: having humans drive early ideation while AI assists with refinement and evaluation preserves idea diversity, whereas using AI at the start of the creative process leads to homogenized outputs. Panelists warned against over-reliance on AI as a "copilot," drawing an analogy to pilots losing manual skills through autopilot overuse. To maintain a competitive innovation edge, organizations should use multiple AI models with varied prompting strategies, encourage independent ideation before AI input, deploy AI as a critic rather than a generator, and establish clear norms about when AI should complement versus substitute for human creativity. The bottom line: companies that carefully structure human-AI collaboration will outperform those that treat AI as a default creative shortcut.