Incentives shape how humans co-create with generative AI

2026-04-03

AI Summary

This study investigates how incentive structures shape human–AI collaboration strategies in creative writing and mitigate the risk of homogenized outputs. Through a pre-registered randomized controlled experiment, we find that incentives emphasizing originality—compared to those rewarding only text quality—significantly enhance the diversity of collective creative output. Participants under originality-focused incentives were more likely to use generative AI for brainstorming, proofreading, and localized revisions, rather than directly adopting its suggestions. These findings underscore the critical role of incentive design in steering user behavior toward more diverse and innovative human–AI co-creation processes, offering a practical approach to counteract the homogenizing effects of generative AI on group creativity.

Abstract

Generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of people's everyday workflows. Early evidence has shown that while generative AI can increase individual-level productivity, it does so at the cost of collective diversity, potentially narrowing the set of ideas and perspectives produced. Our research stands in contrast to this concern: through a pre-registered randomized control trial, we show that incentives mediate AI's homogenizing force in a creative writing task where participants can use AI interactively. Participants rewarded for originality relative to peers produce collectively more diverse writing than those rewarded for quality alone. This divergence is driven not by abandoning AI, but by how participants use it: those incentivized for originality incorporate fewer AI suggestions verbatim, relying on the model more selectively for brainstorming, proofreading, and targeted edits. Our results reveal that the effects of generative AI depend not only on the technology itself, but also the behavioral strategies and incentive structures surrounding its use.

Problem

• generative AI
• collective diversity
• homogenization
• incentives
• creative writing

Innovation

• incentives
• generative AI
• collective diversity
• creative writing
• human-AI collaboration