Ji Jill Xiong
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping creative industries, raising questions about how people evaluate AI-generated work. Building on extant work, we synthesize what we term the mind-superiority hypothesis, which holds that entities perceived as possessing a "mind" receive more favorable evaluations, particularly in creative domains. We apply this framework to the novel context of AI-generated creative work. We first explore whether AI-generated creative work is judged less favorably than human-created work because generative AI is seen as having lower mental capabilities. We then examine whether mentalistic mindset prompts-instructions encouraging observers to interpret an entity in terms of mental activities such as thinking and feeling-can heighten perceived mental capabilities and, in turn, improve evaluations. We also identify reasoning disclosure as a practical intervention that enhances mind perception and boosts evaluations of AI's creative output. Across seven studies (N = 2,333), the results provide converging evidence supporting the mind-superiority hypothesis and provide a theoretically grounded account of why AI-generated creative work is often evaluated less favorably-and how such evaluations can be improved. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).