Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can improve the creativity of individual writers, but collectively reduce the novelty of stories, according to research with nearly 900 volunteers.
The study is published in the journal Science Advances and warns that, while AI can increase individual creativity, it can also cause a loss of joint novelty: according to the work’s experiments, AI-assisted stories contained more similarities to each other and were less varied and diverse.
Therefore, the authors point out in their article, resorting to the help of AI to narrate ultimately diminishes the collective creativity of all stories. If the publishing industry adopted more stories inspired by generative AI, they would be less unique as a whole and more similar to each other.
To reach their conclusions, researchers from the British universities of Exeter and College London (UCL) asked 300 participants to write a short micro-story of eight sentences for a target audience of young adults.
ChatGPT
They were assigned into three groups: one group was not allowed to receive help from the AI; a second group could use ChatGPT to provide a single three-sentence starting idea; and the third could choose up to five AI-generated ideas for inspiration.
The scientists then recruited 600 people to judge the quality of the stories, assessing their novelty (whether they did something new or unexpected) and their “usefulness” (whether they were appropriate for the target audience and whether the ideas could be developed and published). Participants also self-assessed the creativity of their stories using parameters such as novelty and emotional enjoyment.
The team, in turn, determined the inherent creativity of the writers using a divergent association task (DAT) and found that the most creative writers – those with the highest scores on the DAT – were the ones who fewer benefited from the ideas generated by AI, explains a statement from Exeter.
In contrast, less creative writers experienced a greater increase in creativity: access to five AI ideas improved novelty by 10.7% and usefulness by 11.5% compared to those who did not use AI ideas. AI. Their stories were rated up to 26.6% better written, up to 22.6% funnier, and up to 15.2% less boring.
AI “professionalizes” stories, making them more enjoyable, with more possibilities for plot twists, better written and less boring, the authors summarize. However, this technology enhances individual creativity at the cost of less varied content.
OpenAI
The researchers also used the OpenAI application programming interface to calculate the degree of similarity between the stories.They found a 10.7% increase in similarity among writers whose stories used an AI generative idea, compared to the group that didn’t.
Oliver Hauser, from Exeter, summarizes that this is a first step in the study of a question fundamental to all human behavior: how does generative AI affect human creativity?
“Our results provide insight into how generative AI can enhance creativity.”Anil Doshi of UCL adds: ‘While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is a risk that collective novelty is lost. “If the publishing industry adopted more AI-inspired generative stories, our results suggest that stories would be less unique as a whole and more similar to each other.”
