LLMs are already highly creative at generating novel ideas, but they don't benefit from the same creative prompting techniques that help humans think outside the box through forced analogies.
Researchers tested whether cross-domain mapping—forcing creators to draw inspiration from random, unrelated sources—boosts creativity in both humans and LLMs. Humans benefited significantly from this technique, but LLMs showed no consistent improvement, though both systems generated more creative ideas when the source domain was more distant from the target.