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Researcher Xim Cerdá-Company, from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Computer Vision Center (CVC) - Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), has participated in an international study published in Advanced Science, led by a team also affiliated with the University of Barcelona (UB). The study originated from the Neural Networks workshop promoted by Fundació Èpica. Based on this experience—where drawings created by participants were used—a novel methodology was developed to analyze visual creativity by directly comparing humans and artificial intelligence models.

The results are clear: human creativity still outperforms AI, especially in visual imagination tasks. The study shows that image generation models have limited performance, particularly when they do not receive human guidance. In the evaluation of the drawings, visual artists achieved the highest scores, followed by the general population, human-guided AI, and finally unguided AI, highlighting a strong dependence on human intervention in creative processes.

This research highlights the important contribution of Fundació Èpica’s participants, whose creations were essential both for training the models and for the subsequent scientific analysis. The project reinforces the importance of understanding creativity as a complex and collective process, and consolidates the Foundation as a space where collaboration between art, science, and technology generates knowledge with real international impact.

The article: Stable Diffusion Models Reveal a Persisting Human–AI Gap in Visual Creativity.