New benchmark measures the creativity gap in AI UI design
Design Creativity Bench tests 16 models on 80 UI tasks, with GPT-6 Astra scoring 65.5 against a human designer reference of 92.3.
⚠️ Frontier AI models still fall significantly short of human designers on design creativity. ⚠️ Introducing Design Creativity Bench, a new benchmark evaluating AI models’ creativity on UI design tasks. Despite rapid advances in their ability to generate functional websites and product UIs, leading AI models still struggle to make creative design decisions. We evaluated 16 frontier models across 80 open-ended UI tasks, each adapted to two distinct product domains alongside human designer references. Existing UI benchmarks often measure a single output quality metric. Instead, we measure three dimensions of design creativity: - Originality: How distinct a model's designs are from other models' outputs for the same brief. - Creative Range: How much a model adapts its design decisions when the product domain changes. - Appropriateness: How well the generated UI satisfies the functional requirements of the brief. The results reveal a substantial gap in overall creativity: The best model, @OpenAI GPT-6 Astra, scores 65.5 against a human reference of 92.3. We're publishing the full leaderboard, methodology, and reproducible evaluation framework to make design creativity a measurable dimension of frontier model capability. 📊 Benchmark Leaderboard: https://kombai.com/benchmark/ 📄 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11539 🤗 HuggingFace Datasets: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Kombai/design-creativity-bench 🔗 Github: https://github.com/kombai-io/design-creativity-bench/