Too Late to Prune: Generative AI, the Screen, and Team Creative Decisions

Difang Huang, Shumin Yu, Fadong Chen, Weihua Zhou · 2026 · SSRN Electronic Journal

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7592800 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Abstract

Generative AI makes options cheap and shifts the bottleneck of creative work from generating options to screening them. We argue that AI's value depends on whether its options arrive before or after the team's screen. In our model, early options compete for a place in the portfolio; late options arrive after that competition and are kept unscreened. In a preregistered experiment, we randomly assigned 148 three-person teams to five schedules of access to the same language model during a product-design task with timed search and selection stages. Moving the same 15 minutes of access from search

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Topics: Selection (genetic algorithm), Creativity, Task (project management), Generative grammar, Bottleneck, Competition (biology)

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