Artificial Intelligence Enhances Human Creativity Through Real-Time Evaluative Feedback

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into creative work continues to expand, yet its impact on human creativity itself—beyond simply providing ideas—remains uncertain. We reposition AI’s role from idea generator to idea evaluator, using trained models to provide real-time feedback on human-generated ideas. Across two studies—a preregistered online experiment involving individuals with varying levels of expertise (N = 554) and a large-scale naturalistic experiment during a year-long museum exhibit (N = 36,198)—participants generated solutions to real-world problems or created visual sketches. AI feedback significantly improved participant originality in both verbal and visual creative domains. Mediation analyses revealed these gains were partly driven by changes in individuals’ self-evaluation of their own originality, implying a key role for metacognition—the ability to monitor, control and regulate one’s thinking. These findings suggest that AI’s potential extends beyond generation to include idea evaluation, helping humans assess and refine their ideas through real-time feedback.