Artificial Intelligence has made many everyday tasks easier. From researching topics and writing structured content to translating languages, summarising information, and managing data, AI has significantly reduced the time and effort required to get things done. Yet, despite these clear advantages, researchers and academics have long expressed concerns about how AI may be affecting human creativity.
Many studies agree that AI can help users brainstorm ideas. However, they also point out that AI lacks true creativity. While it can reproduce patterns and structures with ease, it struggles to generate original, context-driven ideas that are rooted in human experience, emotion, and intuition.
Why AI struggles with real creativity
Cameron Shackell, Sessional Academic and Visitor at the School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology, explains why AI falls short when it comes to genuine creative thinking.
“AI models don’t contain reality. They rely on the complex statistical abstraction of digital data. This limits their real-world creative significance and their capacity to produce ‘eureka’ moments,” Shackell says.
Because AI systems are trained on existing datasets, they can only generate outputs based on what already exists. They do not experience the real world, emotions, or cultural contexts in the way humans do—elements that often lie at the heart of creativity.
Research finds AI reduces diversity of ideas
These concerns were also highlighted during a webinar titled AI Impacts the Quality and Diversity of Creative Ideas, hosted by Wharton Human-AI Research in September 2025. One consistent finding from the discussion was that although AI can boost individual productivity, it tends to narrow the overall range of ideas.
Oliver Hauser, Professor of Economics at the University of Exeter, noted that people often become influenced by AI-generated suggestions early in the creative process.
“When people start with an AI suggestion, they get anchored to it,” Hauser said, resulting in outputs that are increasingly similar to one another.
This anchoring effect reduces variation in creative thinking, leading to work that may be efficient but lacks originality and distinct viewpoints.
How AI is reshaping journalism and news consumption
The impact of AI is particularly noticeable in journalism, especially after the introduction of AI-generated headlines and summaries on platforms like Google Discover, which many people now rely on for news.
With AI integration, the platform analyses news from multiple websites and condenses headlines and information into short summaries. While this speeds up news consumption, it also has its downsides.
Carefully written headlines crafted by journalists are often replaced by AI-generated versions that can be less engaging and, in some cases, stripped of important context. In doing so, much of the creativity and nuance that writers bring to their stories is lost.
Falling traffic and fewer perspectives
As per a Pew Research report, "users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8 per cent of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15 per cent of visits)".
Although users can still choose to visit the original website and read the full article, the summaries displayed upfront have contributed to noticeable drops in traffic for news websites.
As a result, readers are exposed to fewer perspectives and angles on major news events. Condensed summaries reduce depth and limit access to diverse interpretations, both of which are essential for well-informed journalism.
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