AI Use in Creative Work

This event is part of a series of Psychology seminars that regularly occurs during the Autumn and Spring terms.

Across psychological, philosophical, and theological traditions, creations have been understood as being “made in the image of their creator”—they reflect the person who made them. The rise of generative artificial intelligence, however, has blurred the throughline between creator and creation.

Across three experiments (one pre-registered, U.S. and U.K. samples; N = 651), we examined differences in creator outcomes associated with AI-assisted versus human-only creative work. Compared with human-only work, AI-assisted work was associated with significantly lower self- and identity-relevant indicators, including authenticity, self-creation connection, positive affect, and intrinsic motivation, and with higher levels of the “existential ick” emotions of disgust, guilt, and shame.

Additionally, we found that the authenticity gap is statistically mediated by the creators’ perception that their AI-assisted work contains less of their love, above and beyond differences in perceived effort, uniqueness, quality, and expensiveness. We also ruled out effort justification as an alternative explanation.

Together, these findings suggest that AI reshapes not only how creative work is produced, but also the extent to which creators experience their work as an authentic expression and extension of themselves.