Ex Ante Evaluation of AI-Induced Idea Diversity Collapse

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Azad, Nafis Saami, Baten, Raiyan Abdul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Azad, Nafis Saami
Baten, Raiyan Abdul
author_facet Azad, Nafis Saami
Baten, Raiyan Abdul
contents Creative AI systems are typically evaluated at the level of individual utility, yet creative outputs are consumed in populations: an idea loses value when many others produce similar ones. This creates an evaluation blind spot, as AI can improve individual outputs while increasing population-level crowding. We introduce a human-relative framework for benchmarking AI-induced human diversity collapse without requiring human-AI interaction data, providing an ex ante protocol to estimate crowding risk from model-only generations and matched unaided human baselines. By modeling ideas as congestible resources, we show that source-level crowding is identifiable from within-distribution comparisons, yielding an excess-crowding coefficient $Δ$ and a human-relative diversity ratio $ρ$. We show that $ρ\ge1$ is the no-excess-crowding parity condition and connect $Δ$ to an adoption game with exposure-dependent redundancy costs. Across short stories, marketing slogans, and alternative-uses tasks, three frontier LLMs fall below parity across crowding kernels. Estimates stabilize with feasible model-only sample sizes. Importantly, generation-protocol variants show that crowding can be reduced through targeted design, making diversity collapse an actionable, development-time evaluation target for population-aware creative AI.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06540
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ex Ante Evaluation of AI-Induced Idea Diversity Collapse
Azad, Nafis Saami
Baten, Raiyan Abdul
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
Creative AI systems are typically evaluated at the level of individual utility, yet creative outputs are consumed in populations: an idea loses value when many others produce similar ones. This creates an evaluation blind spot, as AI can improve individual outputs while increasing population-level crowding. We introduce a human-relative framework for benchmarking AI-induced human diversity collapse without requiring human-AI interaction data, providing an ex ante protocol to estimate crowding risk from model-only generations and matched unaided human baselines. By modeling ideas as congestible resources, we show that source-level crowding is identifiable from within-distribution comparisons, yielding an excess-crowding coefficient $Δ$ and a human-relative diversity ratio $ρ$. We show that $ρ\ge1$ is the no-excess-crowding parity condition and connect $Δ$ to an adoption game with exposure-dependent redundancy costs. Across short stories, marketing slogans, and alternative-uses tasks, three frontier LLMs fall below parity across crowding kernels. Estimates stabilize with feasible model-only sample sizes. Importantly, generation-protocol variants show that crowding can be reduced through targeted design, making diversity collapse an actionable, development-time evaluation target for population-aware creative AI.
title Ex Ante Evaluation of AI-Induced Idea Diversity Collapse
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06540