CLIN: an Objective Framework for Evaluating Creativity in Short Persian Literary Text

Creativity is often seen as a hallmark of human intelligence. While large language models(LLMs) are increasingly perceived as generating creative text, there is still no cross-domain and scalable framework to evaluate their creativity across diverse scenarios. Existing methods of LLM creativity evaluation either heavily rely on humans, limiting speed and scalability, or are fragmented across different domains and different definitions of creativity. To address this gap, we propose CreativityPrism, an evaluation and analysis framework that consolidates eight tasks from three domains: divergent thinking, creative writing, and logical reasoning, into a taxonomy of creativity that emphasizes three dimensions: quality, novelty, and diversity of LLM generations. The framework is designed to be scalable with reliable automatic evaluation judges that have been validated against human annotations. We evaluate 17 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs on CreativityPrism and find that while frontier-scale LLMs dominate creative writing and logical reasoning tasks by a .10 (or 15%) lead over locally-deployable open models, they offer no significant advantage in divergent thinking, a domain much less explored in existing post-training regimes. Our analysis also shows that high performance in one creative dimension or domain rarely generalizes to others; specifically, novelty metrics often show weak or negative correlations with other metrics. This fragmentation confirms that a cross-domain, multi-dimensional framework like CreativityPrism is essential for any meaningful assessment of LLM creativity.

Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) as creativity evaluators, evidence of their alignment with human evaluations remains mixed, raising the question of when and why their judgments converge with or diverge from human judgments. Across three studies and six widely used LLMs, we addressed this gap by identifying the standards underlying LLM creativity evaluation and examining their downstream implications. Study 1 showed that LLMs generally relied on a narrower subset of human creativity evaluation standards. Convergence with human standards was strongest in the novelty dimension, whereas divergence was clearest in the contextual dimension, which captures social, market, and reputational information. Moreover, each LLM exhibited distinct, model-specific standards that varied substantially in breadth. These differences in evaluation standards were reflected in actual creativity judgments. Study 2 (N = 1,103 ideas) showed that LLM evaluations were moderately correlated with human evaluations, and individual LLMs with broader standards better distinguished ideas humans judged as more versus less creative. Study 3 (N = 1,195) showed that LLMs were less sensitive to contextual information: such information significantly altered human creativity ratings but left LLM ratings largely unchanged. Together, our findings help explain the mixed evidence on LLM-human alignment, showing that alignment depends on the evidence a judgment demands and the standards each model applies. LLMs may resemble humans when evaluations emphasize intrinsic qualities such as novelty, yet diverge when judgments require contextual information. Selecting an LLM evaluator is therefore a consequential decision: different models, applying different standards, recognize different ideas as creative.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as literary translation. Yet translational creativity remains underexplored and is rarely evaluated at scale, while source-text comprehension is typically studied in isolation, despite the fact that, in professional translation, comprehension and creativity are tightly intertwined. We address these gaps with a paired-task framework applied to literary excerpts from 11 books. Task 1 assesses source-text comprehension, and Task 2 evaluates translational creativity through Units of Creative Potential (UCPs), such as metaphors and wordplay. Using a scalable evaluation setup that combines expert human annotations with UCP-based automatic scoring, we benchmark 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts. Our findings show that strong comprehension does not translate into human-level creativity: models often produce literal or contextually inappropriate renderings, with particularly large gaps for the more distant English-Chinese language pair. Creativity-oriented prompts yield only modest gains, and only one model, Mistral-Large, comes close to human-level creativity (0.167 vs. 0.246). Across all model-prompt combinations, only three exceed a creativity score of 0.1, while the rest remain at or near zero.