Source: Jia et al. (2024) — “When and How Artificial Intelligence Augments Employee Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal
Creativity has a strange relationship with AI.
Some people think AI will make everyone more creative. Some think it will flatten everything into the same smooth beige paste. Both arguments have receipts.
This paper looks at when and how AI augments employee creativity, which is exactly the more useful question.
Because AI does not automatically make people creative.
It gives suggestions. It expands possibilities. It offers combinations that may be surprising, useful, or mildly cursed. Whether that becomes creativity depends on the human using it.
In workplace terms, AI can act like a cognitive resource. It can help employees generate more ideas, escape obvious patterns, and see alternatives they might not have reached alone. That is the good version.
But creativity is not just more ideas.
Anyone who has opened an AI-generated list of 50 suggestions knows this. Quantity arrives very quickly. Quality arrives wearing noise-cancelling headphones and asking for patience.
The human still needs taste, context, and the ability to choose. Without that, AI can create the illusion of creativity while producing ideas that are technically varied but strategically useless.
This is where conditions matter. Employees need the motivation, skill, and support to work with AI actively, not just accept its first answer like it came down from a mountain.
The best use of AI for creativity may be less like outsourcing imagination and more like having a slightly chaotic brainstorming partner who never gets tired.
Useful, yes. Final decision-maker, no.
My takeaway: AI can augment creativity when humans stay engaged as editors, judges, and sense-makers. The danger is not that AI gives us ideas. The danger is that we stop asking whether those ideas are any good.