Generative AI is increasingly transforming creativity into a hybrid human-artificial process, but its impact on the quality and diversity of creative output remains unclear. We study collective creativity using a controlled word-guessing task that balances open-endedness with an objective measure of task performance. Participants attempt to infer a hidden target word, scored based on the semantic similarity of their guesses to the target, while also observing the best guess from previous players. We compare performance and outcome diversity across human-only, AI-only, and hybrid human-AI groups. Hybrid groups achieve the highest performance while preserving high diversity of guesses. Within hybrid groups, both humans and AI agents systematically adjust their strategies relative to single-agent conditions, suggesting higher-order interaction effects, whereby agents adapt to each other's presence. Although some performance benefits can be reproduced through collaboration between heterogeneous AI systems, human-AI collaboration remains superior, underscoring complementary roles in collective creativity.

翻译：生成式人工智能正日益将创造力转变为一种人机混合过程，但其对创意产出质量与多样性的影响尚不明确。本研究通过一项受控猜词任务来探究集体创造力，该任务在开放性与客观绩效度量之间取得平衡。参与者尝试推断一个隐藏的目标词，其猜测根据与目标词的语义相似度进行评分，同时可观察先前参与者的最佳猜测。我们比较了纯人类组、纯AI组以及人机混合组的性能表现与结果多样性。混合组在保持高猜测多样性的同时实现了最优性能。在混合组内部，人类与AI智能体均相对于单智能体条件系统性地调整其策略，这表明存在高阶交互效应，即智能体相互适应对方的存在。尽管部分性能优势可通过异构AI系统间的协作复现，但人机协作仍具优越性，这凸显了二者在集体创造力中的互补作用。