Two research teams found a similar trade-off. In their experiments, people who received AI-generated ideas often produced work that earned better individual ratings. Put everyone’s work together, though, and the pool became more alike.
The newest study is a preregistered preprint from Mengchen Dong and Hiromu Yakura. It involved 644 native- and non-native-English writers completing short metaphor tasks. Writers who used AI for the initial idea produced the most homogeneous pool. Writers who made their own metaphor first and used AI to refine it stayed statistically close to the no-AI group on the study’s main diversity measure.
That same trade-off appeared in a peer-reviewed 2024 study in Science Advances. Access to AI ideas improved short-story ratings, especially for less creative writers, while the AI-assisted stories became more similar to one another.
Together, the studies offer a clue rather than a universal rule. They used metaphors and eight-sentence stories, so they cannot tell us what happens in every staff meeting, classroom, family plan, or product workshop. But they give us a useful habit to test.
Five minutes before the prompt
At your next group brainstorm:
- Give everyone five quiet minutes.
- Have each person write three ideas without AI.
- Combine the lists before anyone starts editing them.
- Bring in AI to compare, refine, translate, expand, or look for a missing angle.
Your first list carries the odd details a shared prompt may smooth away: the customer complaint you remember, the local constraint, the phrase your family uses, the failure nobody wants to repeat. Making that list first does not guarantee originality. It gives the group more human starting points to work with.
Then AI can help push those ideas further.