Same Stimulus, Different Ideas: Prior Knowledge and the Integration of AI-Generated Stimuli in Creative Ideation

External stimuli can expand the conceptual space during creative ideation, yet individuals may incorporate the same stimuli differently depending on the knowledge and experience available to them. This issue bears on the information-processing mechanisms of creativity and on the use of generative artificial intelligence as a source of stimuli. Nine groups (221 participants) from three educational and sociocultural contexts (Indigenous and Afro-descendant community members holding traditional knowledge, rural school students, and university students) took part in ideation workshops to design agro-industrial products. Stimuli were generated with a large language model. Semantic and conceptual embedding similarity and topic modelling were used to compare initial ideas, stimuli, and final ideas. Topic models of these very short texts were unstable. In the community and school groups, conceptual integration generally stayed close to the initial proximity between ideas and stimuli, whereas the university groups more often exceeded it, a tendency that held across alternative representations but not in every group. Coffee-domain groups, whose ideas and stimuli shared the vocabulary of the raw material, combined high persistence with high integration. Three exploratory forms of integration are proposed: conceptual reinterpretation, expansion, and transformation. The analyses are descriptive, and prior knowledge was not measured directly.