# Beyond Divergent Creativity: A Human-Based Evaluation of Creativity in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14556/) (2023)
- [Putting GPT-3's Creativity to the (Alternative Uses) Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08932/) (2022)
- [IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04025/) (2024)
- [AI as Humanity's Salieri: Quantifying Linguistic Creativity of Language Models via Systematic Attribution of Machine Text against Web Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04265/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Language Model Creativity: A Case Study on Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09007/) (2024)
- [Probing the Creativity of Large Language Models: Can models produce divergent semantic association?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11158/) (2023)
- [Universal Text Representation from BERT: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07973/) (2019)
- [Evidence of interrelated cognitive-like capabilities in large language models: Indications of artificial general intelligence or achievement?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11616/) (2023)
- [Automated Creativity Evaluation for Large Language Models: A Reference-Based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15784/) (2025)
- [Small Language Models can Outperform Humans in Short Creative Writing: A Study Comparing SLMs with Humans and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11547/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text Creativity across Diverse Domains: A Dataset and Large Language Model Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19236/) (2025)
- [Enhancing user creativity: Semantic measures for idea generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10131/) (2021)
- [Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05999/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Are LLMs becoming similarly creative? Evidence from three years of models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19437/) (2026)
- [Interrupting the Loop: Periodic Subject Changes Raise Judged Surprise and Connection in Base Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19893/) (2026)
- [Assessing the Creativity of Large Language Models: Testing, Limits, and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13450/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in verbal creative tasks. However, previous assessments of the creative capabilities of LLMs remain weakly grounded in human creativity theory and are thus hard to interpret. The widely used Divergent Association Task (DAT) focuses on novelty, ignoring appropriateness, a core component of creativity. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art LLMs on DAT and show that their scores on the task are lower than those of two baselines that do not possess any creative abilities, undermining its validity for model evaluation. Grounded in human creativity theory, which defines creativity as the combination of novelty and appropriateness, we introduce Conditional Divergent Association Task (CDAT). CDAT evaluates novelty conditional on contextual appropriateness, separating noise from creativity better than DAT, while remaining simple and objective. Under CDAT, smaller model families often show the most creativity, whereas advanced families favor appropriateness at lower novelty. We hypothesize that training and alignment likely shift models along this frontier, making outputs more appropriate but less creative. We release the dataset and code.