Generative AI Does Not Erase Individual Differences in Human Creativity

For over a century, researchers have documented robust individual differences in people’s ability to think creatively. Today, however, generative AI appears to democratize creativity, potentially minimizing individual differences by offering powerful tools for anyone to generate ideas, stories, and more. Do individual differences still matter for creativity when everyone has access to the same advanced technology? Across two studies (N = 442), we tested whether two individual factors—creative ability (assessed via idea generation and story-writing tasks) and general intelligence (assessed via reasoning and knowledge tests)—predict performance in creative collaboration with large language models (LLMs). We isolate for the first time a latent construct for AI-assisted creativity, unique and separable from creativity without AI. Study 1 found that baseline creative writing ability strongly predicted AI-assisted story writing with GPT- 4o (β = .42): people who wrote more original stories without AI also wrote better stories with AI. Study 2 replicated and extended this finding, showing that people who were more creative (β = .39) and intelligent (β = .35) in general performed better on entirely different creative tasks done with AI assistance. Thus, people with more creative task expertise (Study 1) and those with higher baseline cognitive abilities (Study 2) produced more original ideas, despite all participants having equal access to a powerful LLM. Our findings suggest that the successful use of generative AI may preserve individual differences in human creativity and intelligence, highlighting implications for education and the future of creative work.