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ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 1107–1109 (2025)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 14 May 2025

The Original Article was published on 12 August 2024

arising from B. C. Lee & J. J. Chung Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01953-1 (2024)

Lee and Chung1 explore how ChatGPT augments human creativity in brainstorming. In a series of experiments, they randomized participants to complete various creative challenges, either with or without the help of ChatGPT. These challenges included tasks such as coming up with gift ideas, designing toys from everyday objects and repurposing household items. Each participant submitted one idea, which external evaluators rated on multiple creativity dimensions, including innovativeness and usefulness. Across tasks, instructing participants to use ChatGPT enhanced the average creativity of ideas, outperforming web searches and unaided human intuition, with creativity measured as the average of aggregated scores of originality (original, innovative, creative) and appropriateness (practical, effective, useful). These results strengthen the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of large language models in idea generation, contributing to a rapidly growing literature2,3,4. However, as we demonstrate analytically, reliance on ChatGPT for idea generation comes with a trade-off: while enhancing individual ideas’ creativity, it reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas—a critical element for effective brainstorming.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of the diversity of ideas from all experiments using the percentage of unique ideas (threshold 0.8).

Data availability

The data reported in this paper were collected by Lee and Chung1 and are available via OSF at https://osf.io/rzn87 (ref. 7).

Code availability

The analysis scripts generating all results, figures and tables reported in the main text and the Supplementary Information are available via OSF at https://osf.io/zf3s2 (ref. 6).

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Lennart Meincke, Gideon Nave & Christian Terwiesch

  2. WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar, Germany

    Lennart Meincke

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  1. Lennart Meincke
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  2. Gideon Nave
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  3. Christian Terwiesch
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Contributions

L.M., G.N. and C.T. designed the study. G.N and C.T. managed the study. L.M. conducted all analyses reported in the paper. L.M., G.N. and C.T. drafted the paper and reviewed and approved its final version.

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Correspondence to Gideon Nave.

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Supplementary Information and Supplementary Table 1.

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Meincke, L., Nave, G. & Terwiesch, C. ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming. Nat Hum Behav 9, 1107–1109 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02173-x

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