This study asks whether the way people think about creativity, as a process or as a finished product, changes how they judge short stories, without ever knowing which stories were written by a human and which by an AI. Ninety participants rated a set of stories before and after being primed with a process-focused or product-focused view of creativity, or no prime at all. 

The prime did not change how favourably human stories were rated relative to AI ones: across every condition, AI-written stories were consistently rated as more creative than human-written ones, despite creator identity never being disclosed. A closer look at the language raters used to describe the stories showed that the product prime shifted the words people reached for, even in conditions where their actual ratings stayed the same. The findings raise questions about what people are really responding to when they judge creativity, and how easily that judgement can be swayed even when the outcome looks unchanged.