Characterising the Creative Process in Humans and Large Language Models

Understand

Large language models appear quite creative, often performing on par with the average human on creative tasks.

• However, research on LLM creativity has focused solely on \textit{products}, with little attention on the creative \textit{process}.
• Process analyses of human creativity often require hand-coded categories or exploit response times, which do not apply to LLMs.
• We provide an automated method to characterise how humans and LLMs explore semantic spaces on the Alternate Uses Task, and contrast with behaviour in a Verbal Fluency Task.