The Crowdless Future? How Generative AI Is Shaping the Future of Human Crowdsourcing

The rapid advances in generative AI have the potential to reshape organizational innovation, raising uncertainty about the role of human solvers in this new era of augmented intelligence. We initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business opportunities, comparing the capabilities of GPT-4 and human solvers in generating novel and valuable solutions. The challenge attracted a diverse range of global solvers from various industries. 300 evaluators assessed a randomized selection of 13 out of 234 human and AI solutions, totaling 3,900 evaluator–solution pairs. Our findings reveal that, although AI solutions delivered more environmental and financial value—possibly due to a tendency to align with the central patterns seen in their training—human outputs were rated as more innovative, including extreme outcomes at the right tail of the novelty distribution. Our analysis of the rich solution text using natural language processing techniques reveals considerable overlap in semantic dissimilarity metrics between human and AI responses, but humans still exhibit greater linguistic nuances than AI. This study illuminates the promise of AI in augmenting human crowdsourcing for solving complex organizational problems and sets the groundwork for a possible integrative human-AI approach to innovative problem-solving.