The authenticity gap: Why generative AI cannot replicate human creativity

This article examines whether generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) can be considered creative when evaluated through a dynamic cross-cultural framework of creativity. Integrating the dynamic model of creativity (Corazza et al., 2022) with the four-criterion construct of creativity (Kharkhurin, 2014), the analysis evaluates Gen-AI across four dimensions: originality, effectiveness, aesthetics, and authenticity. The article advances the thesis that human and artificial creative potentials unfold through different architectures. Human creativity develops through integrative processes grounded in autobiographical experience, embodied perception, and evolving identity. Gen-AI systems expand creative search spaces through statistical learning and large-scale computational exploration. The analysis shows substantial convergence between human and artificial creativity in potential originality and effectiveness, and partial convergence in aesthetics. The principal divergence appears in authenticity. Authentic creative expression requires autobiographical grounding, reflective self-integration, and value-oriented interpretation of experience, capacities that current AI systems do not possess. Emerging technologies such as persistent memory architectures, agent-based systems, multimodal models, and quantum computing may expand the originality, effectiveness, and aesthetic range of AI-generated outputs, while only approximating surface-level features of authenticity. These findings suggest that Gen-AI can participate meaningfully in creative processes as a human-made, non-living tool, while lacking the experiential grounding that characterizes authentic human creativity. The article therefore positions Gen-AI as a collaborator and enhancer within cyber-creative processes whose value depends on human purposes, ethical responsibility, and cultural interpretation.