Serendipity by Design: Evaluating the Impact of Cross-domain Mappings on Human and LLM Creativity

This study compares how humans and large language models (LLMs) generate creative ideas, specifically testing whether a technique called 'cross-domain mapping'—forcing creators to draw inspiration from random, unrelated sources—boosts creativity in both. The researchers found that humans benefit significantly from this technique, while LLMs already generate highly original ideas on their own and don't show the same improvement; however, both humans and LLMs do generate more creative ideas when the inspiration source is more different from the target topic.