An experiment was conducted to compare the brainstorming capabilities of students and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. Several groups of undergraduate and graduate industrial design students participated in brainstorming sessions to solve three specific problems. The students had varying levels of experience with creative thinking methods and brainstormed under different environmental conditions (suitable/crowded, with/without stress).
The same problems were presented to accessible AI platforms, including OpenAI (GPT4), Google (Gemini 1.5), and Anthropic (Claude3 Opus). The number of ideas generated and the classifications of those ideas were compared between the student groups and the AI platforms.
The experiment aimed to assess the impact of factors such as environmental conditions, educational status, and familiarity with creativity methods on the number and diversity of ideas generated by humans and AI.