--- title: "Who expands the human creative frontier with generative AI: Hive minds or masterminds? · AI Fault Line" url: https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1126-sciadv-adu5800/ description: "AI Fault Line is a neutral, evidence-cited field guide to why experts looking at the same developments disagree about AI's effect on productivity, jobs, inequality, regulation and the pace of change." --- [Research](https://aifaultline.com/research/) # Who expands the human creative frontier with generative AI: Hive minds or masterminds? Eric Zhou, Dokyun Lee, Bin Gu · Science Advances · 3 Sep 2025 [Read original source](https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adu5800) Open access Where this sits in the debate - [Will AI actually boost productivity and growth?](https://aifaultline.com/debate/productivity/) Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model ([AI-written](https://aifaultline.com/about/)). ## Abstract Artists are rapidly integrating generative text-to-image models into their workflows, yet how this affects creative discovery remains unclear. Leveraging large-scale data from an online art platform, we compare artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted creators to matched nonadopters to assess novel idea contributions. Initially, a concentrated subset of AI-assisted creators contributes more novel artifacts in absolute terms through increased output-the productivity effect-although the average rate of contributing novel artifacts decreases because of a dilution effect. This reflects a shift toward high-volume, incremental exploration, ultimately yielding a greater aggregate of novel artifacts by AI-assisted creators. We observe no evidence of a human-AI effect above and beyond the productivity effect. The release of open-source Stable Diffusion accelerates novel contributions across a more diverse group, suggesting that text-to-image tools facilitate exploration at scale, initially enabling persistent breakthroughs by select "masterminds," driven by increased volume, and subsequently enabling widespread novel contributions from a "hive mind." ## About this publication **Leading field journal.** A leading journal in economics or a neighbouring field (on the Tinbergen Institute’s A list or near the top of the RePEc ranking), or a top-rated computer-science venue. Placed by: Leading field journal. [How sources are ranked](https://aifaultline.com/about/#source-ranking). Published 2025 (14 months ago) Citations 10 (OpenAlex) ## Citations in context [Chart: 10 citations, cohort median 10] 10 citations — 58th percentile among the 33 indexed papers from 2025 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature. [Chart: published 2025] □ added to this collection in 2026. author affiliation matches seed institution boston university — part of why this paper is in the collection. ## More on this topic Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion. - [Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1287-orsc-2025-21838/) Organization Science · 2026 - [Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-2139-ssrn-4573321/) SSRN · 2023 - [Generative AI at Work](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1093-qje-qjae044/) The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025 - [The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-48550-arxiv-2302-06590/) arXiv · 2023 Overview assembled automatically from collected metadata. [How this site is built](https://aifaultline.com/about/).