Divergent creativity in humans and large language models
The primary study behind the creativity comparison used in Chapters 5 and 16: some AI systems surpassed average human performance on the tested divergent-creativity tasks, while the most creative half and top 10% of human participants still outperformed every model tested. Karim Jerbi’s quoted interpretation in Chapter 16 comes from the separate Université de Montréal news release listed there.
Cited in
Bellemare-Pepin, A., Lespinasse, F., Tholke, P., Harel, Y., Mathewson, K., Olson, J. A., Bengio, Y. and Jerbi, K. 'Divergent creativity in humans and large language models.' Scientific Reports, 21 January 2026. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-25157-3. (Universite de Montreal-led collaboration with Concordia, Toronto Mississauga, Mila and Google DeepMind.)