Cross-domain association boosts human creative originality, but seven LLMs overall do not benefit
A five-person team including Liu, Dubova and Griffiths self-reports that random cross-domain cues reliably raise human originality, while seven LLMs overall gain nothing, with only the top model benefiting on far-distance pairings.
ImportanceLocalEvidenceE2 unreplicated
Random cross-domain sources reliably boost the creative originality of products designed by humans, but seven large language models overall did not benefit from the same cross-domain association intervention; only when the source and target were semantically distant enough did the highest-rated LLM benefit.
It was previously unclear whether both humans and machines could gain originality from cross-domain association. A five-person team including Liu, Dubova and Griffiths had human subjects and seven LLMs design products using random cross-domain sources, finding that the LLMs' ideas were overall more original than humans' yet did not benefit from the intervention. Humans tend to transfer surface features, while LLMs tend to transfer structural and functional properties. These are the authors' self-reported experimental findings.
The results are self-reported by the authors, appear in arXiv preprint 2603.19087 (first submitted March 19, revised to v3 on September 15), and have not yet been independently reproduced.
Source: arXiv:2603.19087 abstract page ↗