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的过程，但其对创意产出的质量与多样性的影响尚不明确。本研究通过一项受控的猜词任务来探究集体创造力，该任务在开放性与任务表现的客观度量之间取得了平衡。参与者尝试推断一个隐藏的目标词，其猜测的得分基于与目标词的语义相似度，同时也能观察到先前参与者提供的最佳猜测。我们比较了纯人类组、纯AI组以及人机混合组在任务表现和结果多样性上的差异。混合组在保持高猜测多样性的同时实现了最佳任务表现。在混合组内部，人类和AI智能体均相对于单智能体条件系统性地调整了策略，这表明存在高阶交互效应，即智能体能够适应彼此的存在。尽管部分性能优势可以通过异构AI系统之间的协作得以复现，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。