WASHINGTON: If the creative industries adopt artificial intelligence to help with story writing, future books and films could start to all look the same, a study published on Friday warned.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances with the help of hundreds of volunteers, comes amid growing concern about the influence of widespread AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing.
“Our goal was to explore to what extent and how generative AI can aid human creativity,” Anil Doshi of University College London told AFP.
For the experiment, Doshi and co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers to act as “writers.”
These were people who did not make a living from writing, and their innate creativity was assessed by a standard psychological test that asked them to name ten completely different words.
The scientists then randomly divided the participants into three groups and asked them to write an eight-sentence story about one of three themes: an adventure on the open sea, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet.
Participants were randomly divided into three groups that received different levels of AI assistance.
The first group was given no assistance, the second group was provided with a three-sentence story idea by ChatGPT, and the third group could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to get started.
Individual Gain, Collective Loss
After participants finished writing their stories, they were asked to rate the creativity of their stories on criteria such as how original they were, how enjoyable they were, and how likely their idea was to be published as a book.
An additional 600 external reviewers also evaluated the articles using the same criteria.
The authors found that, on average, AI improved an individual writer's creative quality by up to 10 percent and their story's enjoyability by 22 percent, particularly contributing to elements such as structure and plot twists.
These effects were most pronounced for writers judged to be the least creative in the first assignment, “so this has a kind of leveling the playing field effect,” Doshi said.
However, on a collective level, they found that writers “anchored” themselves too strongly to the ideas proposed, resulting in AI-assisted stories being much more similar to each other than stories produced without AI assistance.
Hauser said this creates a “social dilemma”: On the one hand, “it makes it easier for people to participate — lowering the barriers is a good thing,” but if the overall novelty of the arts is reduced, “it could be harmful in the future.”
Doshi said the study showed that just as giving a child a calculator too early can prevent them from mastering basic arithmetic, there were also risks of becoming too reliant on AI tools before they have mastered fundamental skills like writing and music.
People need to start thinking about, “Where can I insert this tool into my workflow to get the most benefit while still having my say in the project and the outcome?”
