A Comparative Study on Perceived Creativity in Children’s Stories by Generative AI and Human Authors from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Focusing on Expert Qualitative Evaluation

This study was initiated in response to the increasing adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in creative education, particularly in digital storytelling courses where students actively engage with AI tools. The purpose of this research is to examine how experts perceive and evaluate the creativity of children’s stories generated by AI in comparison to those written by human authors.<br/> Accordingly, the study collected expert evaluation texts through classroom-based observations and implemented qualitative analysis methods, including frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, semantic network analysis, and topic modeling.<br/> The results of the study are as follows. First, experts tended to assess AI-generated stories based on their structural coherence and technical novelty but also noted a lack of emotional engagement and creative transformation. Second, human-written stories were evaluated as having greater emotional depth, flexible narrative structures, and more meaningful imaginative development.<br/> Based on these findings, it is expected that this study will contribute to the development of cognitive and emotional criteria for evaluating narrative creativity. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of human interpretive judgment in educational settings and offers practical implications for designing AI-assisted storytelling systems as supportive tools for creative learning and collaborative authorship.