Artificial intelligence and its benefits have taken the world by storm, with a myriad of novel technologies boasting millions of users daily and an outpouring of research illustrating the significant contributions of AI toward organizational processes and outcomes. Despite this enthusiasm, an overwhelming consensus against the usage of AI has developed in tandem, wherein numerous individuals have cautioned the crippling effects of AI on human creativity. Accordingly, to address these competing tensions, we identify threat to human creativity as a novel barrier to AI adoption and demonstrate how a creative growth mindset intervention efficaciously overcomes this hurdle. Through four pre-registered laboratory, lab-in-the-field, and field intervention studies (SN = 1,063), we show that fostering a creative growth mindset increases adoption of AI, both in intention (Studies 1–2) and real behavior (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, we find individuals become more creative in problem-solving tasks when they employ AI to a greater extent, indicating that AI adoption serves as the causal mechanism linking creative growth mindset intervention to augmented creative performance (Studies 2–4). In testing that AI threat is inherently about human creativity, we also document the positive impacts engendered by creative growth mindset (Studies 1–3)—more so than growth mindset in other domains—on a wide range of attitudinal (e.g., trust) and behavioral consequences (e.g., donation) toward AI, as well as rule out alternative mechanisms (Study 2). Taken together, our research highlights the power of creative growth mindset intervention in driving AI adoption and the associated performance benefits of incorporating AI technologies in creative work.
