The Asymmetric Impact of Generative AI on Creative Exploration: Evidence from Commercial Design Contests

主讲人：张妮拉 副教授 信息管理与商业智能系

时间：2026-10-13 13:30-14:30

地点：

线下：史代楼410室

内容摘要:

Creative work often involves exploring alternative solutions to a given task. Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly reshaping creative workflows, its implications for creative exploration remain poorly understood. Drawing on the context of commercial graphic design, we investigate how the availability of GenAI affects creative exploration across different aesthetic dimensions. Leveraging the release of text-to-image GenAI capabilities, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to analyze 74,585 designs created by 6,800 freelance designers. Our findings reveal divergent effects of GenAI on creative exploration: while GenAI availability increases exploration in the color dimension, it reduces exploration in the structural dimension. These findings suggest that GenAI facilitates exploration along aesthetic dimensions associated with intuitive processing while constraining exploration along dimensions that demand more deliberate, analytical reasoning. Furthermore, we find that these effects are contingent on task incentives. Specifically, higher monetary prizes and lower competition intensity strengthen the positive effect of GenAI on color exploration while attenuating its negative effect on structural exploration. Our study contributes to the understanding of AI-assisted creativity by revealing how GenAI can simultaneously expand and constrain creative exploration across distinct aesthetic dimensions and identifying task incentives as important boundary conditions shaping these divergent effects.