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As generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) becomes more prevalent, it becomes increasingly important to understand how people psychologically respond to the content it explicitly creates. In this research, we demonstrate that exposure to gen-AI produced content can affect people’s self-confidence at the same task through a social comparison process. Anchoring this research in the domain of creativity, we find that exposing people to creative content believed to have been created by gen-AI (vs. a human peer) increases people’s self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities. This effect emerges for jokes, stories, poetry, and visual art, and it can consequently increase people’s willingness to attempt the activity—even though the greater confidence underscoring their actions might be unwarranted. We further show that these effects emerge because gen-AI is perceived as a lower social referent for creative endeavors, bolstering people’s own self-perceptions. As a result, for domains in which gen-AI is perceived as an equal or greater social referent (i.e., in fact-based domains), the effects are attenuated. These findings have significant implications for understanding human–AI interactions, antecedents for creative self-confidence, and the known referents that people use for social comparison effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
