Death of the Novel(ty): Beyond n-Gram Novelty as a Metric for Textual Creativity

Research analyzing 8,618 expert annotations reveals that n-gram novelty, commonly used to evaluate AI text generation, is insufficient for measuring textual creativity. While positively correlated with creativity, 91% of high n-gram novel expressions were not judged as creative by experts, and higher novelty in open-source LLMs correlates with lower pragmatic quality.