Organizations: Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sociology, Sylhet, Bangladesh · Independent University, Bangladesh, Department of Law, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Industrial Engineering, Sylhet, Bangladesh
As AI enters creative practice, audiences face growing uncertainty in judging authenticity and value. This study examines the Struggle Premium, the added value attributed to perceived human effort, by analyzing how visible effort cues influence evaluations of human- and AI-generated creative works. We surveyed 70 university students, focusing on process videos, time documentation, written explanations, and imperfections. Process-oriented cues, especially videos and time spent, most strongly shaped authenticity and value judgments, while imperfections had limited impact. Participants showed a clear preference for human-made works, with 72.9% willing to pay more. Notably, effort cues also improved perceptions of AI-generated content, suggesting that process transparency can partially bridge authenticity gaps. These findings extend the effort heuristic to algorithmic creativity and inform the design of transparent human-AI creative systems.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Descriptive Statistics of (a) Key Variables (Mean ± SD) and (b) Willingness to Pay for Human-Made Work vs AI Work
Figure 2. AI Perception Measures: (a) Response Distributions (Mean and Standard Deviation); (b) Recognition Rates of Visible Effort Elements (Percentage of Respondents)
Generative AI is rapidly transforming how organizations create value and evaluate talent. While large language models enhance baseline output quality, they simultaneously introduce ambiguity in assessing human creativity, as observable artifacts may be partially or fully AI-generated. This paper reconceptualizes creativity as a distributional and process-based property that emerges under shared constraints and competitive incentives. We introduce a quantitative framework for measuring creativity as novelty in synthesis, operationalized through idea generation and idea transformation within embedding space. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the proposed metrics align with intuitive judgments of creativity while capturing distinctions that surface-level quality assessments miss. We further identify a structural shift toward bimodal distributions of creative output in AI-mediated environments, with implications for hiring, leadership, and competitive strategy. The findings suggest that in the age of generative AI, distinctiveness rather than fluency becomes the primary signal of human creative capability.
Yigal Rosen, Ilia Rushkin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Ignis AI · Ignis AI
Modern AI evaluation frameworks treat evaluator disagreement as noise to be resolved. In creative domains, professional disagreement reflects genuine differences in taste, not measurement error. We argue that evaluating creative AI requires preserving two distinct signals: convergence, where professionals align around shared best practices, and divergence, where individual taste legitimately varies. We present the Human Creativity Benchmark (HCB), a benchmark that operationalizes this separation by collecting pairwise preferences, scalar ratings on prompt adherence, usability, and visual appeal, and qualitative rationale from domain professionals. Across 15,000 professional judgments spanning five creative domains and three workflow phases (ideation, mockup, refinement), we find that convergence concentrates on verifiable dimensions like technical correctness and visual hierarchy, while divergence concentrates on taste-driven dimensions like aesthetic direction and conceptual risk. No model excels uniformly across all phases. Collapsing these signals into a single quality metric discards the most actionable information: where models must be correct versus where they should remain steerable.
We examine the structural transformation of creative industries under generative artificial intelligence, drawing on 374 primary sources spanning policy documents, industry data, creator surveys, and platform analytics. Beginning with the December 2024 release of OpenAI's Sora video model as a watershed event, we trace the historical pattern of creative resistance to technological disruption, then develop an analytical framework -- the Human-AI Agency Continuum for mapping the spectrum of human and machine collaboration in creative work. We present evidence for the "slop ceiling," an audience-imposed quality threshold that constrains AI-generated content to approximately 1--3% of platform streams despite comprising 44% of uploads. Analysis of the UK Government's 2025 consultation on AI and copyright (over 11,500 responses, 88% opposing expanded AI training rights) reveals deep structural tensions between technology firms and creative workers. We investigate how major studios, from Disney's $1 billion OpenAI investment to Netflix's AI-native animation unit, are positioning for an AI-augmented production pipeline. The work covers coordination collapse in creative supply chains, the emergence of new professional roles such as prompt engineers and AI orchestrators, and proposes four principles for navigating the transition: transparency, consent, compensation, and human-centred design. Eight appendices provide quantitative analysis, a glossary, topical bibliography, and deep dives into shadow AI adoption, AI stigma, and algorithmic intent.