A Comparative Approach to Assessing Linguistic Creativity of Large Language Models and Humans

TL;DR

This paper presents a new linguistic creativity test for humans and large language models, evaluating their ability to generate original words and phrases, revealing that LLMs outperform humans in most tasks and exhibit different creative tendencies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive linguistic creativity assessment for both humans and LLMs, with automated evaluation and analysis of their creative differences.

Findings

LLMs outperform humans in most creativity criteria

LLMs excel in six out of eight tasks

Humans show more E-creativity, LLMs favor F-creativity

Abstract

The following paper introduces a general linguistic creativity test for humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). The test consists of various tasks aimed at assessing their ability to generate new original words and phrases based on word formation processes (derivation and compounding) and on metaphorical language use. We administered the test to 24 humans and to an equal number of LLMs, and we automatically evaluated their answers using OCSAI tool for three criteria: Originality, Elaboration, and Flexibility. The results show that LLMs not only outperformed humans in all the assessed criteria, but did better in six out of the eight test tasks. We then computed the uniqueness of the individual answers, which showed some minor differences between humans and LLMs. Finally, we performed a short manual analysis of the dataset, which revealed that humans are more inclined towards E(extending)-creativity, while LLMs favor F(ixed)-creativity.