AI-assisted stories turn out to be more creative, better written, and more enjoyable

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Story Time

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Research published in the journal Scientific advances AI has been found to increase creativity by increasing not only the novelty of story ideas but also the “usefulness” of stories (their ability to interest target audiences and likelihood of publication). The paper is titled “Generative AI Increases Individual Creativity but Reduces Overall Diversity of Novel Content.”

AI was found to “professionalize” stories, making them more enjoyable, enhancing story development, improving writing quality, and making them less boring.

In a study that tasked 300 participants with writing short, eight-sentence “microstories” for a young adult audience, researchers found that participants judged to be less creative produced work that was up to 26.6% higher quality and 15.2% less boring with the AI.

However, AI was not judged to improve work produced by more creative authors.

The study warned that while AI has the potential to boost individual creativity, it could also lead to a loss of collective novelty, as AI-assisted stories were found to be more similar to each other and less diverse and varied.

Researchers from the University of Exeter Business School, the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and UCL Management School split 300 study participants into three groups: one group received no AI assistance, a second group was provided with one three-sentence idea using ChatGPT, and a third group of writers were able to choose from up to five AI-generated ideas for inspiration.

The researchers then recruited 600 people to rate the stories on their novelty (whether the story does something new or unexpected) and “usefulness” (whether it's relevant to the target audience, and whether the idea could be developed and published) to determine whether it was good or bad.

They found that writers with the most access to AI experienced the greatest creative benefits, with their stories' novelty scores being 8.1% higher and novelty scores being 9% higher compared to stories written without AI.

Writers who used up to five AI-generated ideas also scored higher on emotional traits, producing stories that were better written, more enjoyable, less boring and more entertaining.

The researchers assessed writers' innate creativity using a divergent association task (DAT) and found that the more creative writers (those with the highest DAT scores) benefited the least from the generative AI's ideas.

Conversely, less creative writers saw a big boost in creativity: using the five AI ideas increased novelty by 10.7% and usefulness by 11.5% compared to writers who didn't use any AI ideas. Their stories were rated as up to 26.6% easier to write, up to 22.6% more enjoyable, and up to 15.2% less boring.

These improvements would bring writers with low DAT scores on par with writers with high DAT scores, essentially equalizing the creativity of low and high creative writers.

The researchers also used OpenAI's embedded application programming interface (API) to calculate similarities between stories.

The researchers found a 10.7% increase in similarity between writers who used one generative AI idea in their story compared to the non-AI group.

“This is the first step towards studying a fundamental question of all human behaviour: how generative AI affects human creativity,” said Oliver Hauser, professor of economics and deputy director of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Exeter Business School.

“Our findings provide insight into how generative AI can enhance creativity and eliminate disadvantages or advantages based on a writer's natural creativity.”

Anil Doshi, Associate Professor at the London School of Management, University of London, added: “While these results point to improvements in individual creativity, there is a risk that collective novelty will be lost. If the publishing industry adopts more generative storytelling inspired by AI, our results suggest that stories as a whole will become less unique and more similar to each other.”

“This downward spiral resembles a new social dilemma: if individual authors see that their work inspired by generative AI is judged to be more creative, they will have an incentive to use more generative AI in the future, but in doing so, this may make stories overall even less novel,” Professor Hauser warned.

“In sum, our findings suggest that despite the enhancing effects that generative AI may have on individual creativity, there may be caveats to be observed if generative AI is widely adopted for creative tasks.”

For more information:
Anil Doshi et al., “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content.” Scientific advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn5290. Science

Provided by University of Exeter

Quote: Stories written with the help of AI are found to be more creative, better written, and more enjoyable (July 12, 2024) Retrieved July 14, 2024 from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-stories-written-ai-creative-enjoyable.html

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