summary: A new study shows that AI can help make stories more creative, engaging, and well-written, especially for less creative writers. The study found that with AI's assistance, stories become more novel and useful, making them more enjoyable and less boring.
However, they also warn that widespread use of AI could undermine the diversity and originality of creative works.The findings of this study highlight both the potential and risks of using AI for creative endeavors.
Key Facts:
- Increased creativity: AI makes stories more creative and fun, especially for less creative writers.
- Uniformity Risk: AI-assisted stories tend to be more similar, lowering their overall novelty.
- Research Insights: AI may increase individual creativity but reduce the likelihood of producing original results.
sauce: University of Exeter
Stories written with the help of AI are judged to be more creative, better written, and more enjoyable.
A new study published in the journal Scientific advances AI has been shown to enhance creativity by increasing not only the novelty of story ideas but also the “usefulness” of a story – its ability to interest a target audience and its likelihood of being published.
It turns out that AI “professionalizes” stories, making them more entertaining, with more plot twists, better written, and 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 also warned that while AI has the potential to enhance individual creativity, it could also result in 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 judge the stories, rating them on 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).
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 who earned the highest DAT scores benefited the least from 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.
Oliver Hauser, professor of economics and deputy director of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Exeter Business School, said: “This is the first step in researching a question that is fundamental to all human behaviour: how generative AI will affect human creativity.
“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 UCL's School of Management, added: “These results are Individual There is a risk of losing creativity Collective Newness. If If the publishing industry were to adopt more generative storytelling inspired by AI, our findings would suggest that stories as a whole would become less unique and more They are similar to each other.”
Professor Hauser warned: “This downward spiral shows parallels with a new social dilemma. If individual writers knew that their writing inspired by generative AI would be judged as more creative, There is an incentive to make more use of generative AI in the future, but doing so will allow the collective It may make the story even less novel.
“In summary, our findings There may be a caveat to the enhancing effect of generative AI on individual creativity. “If generative AI were to be more widely adopted for creative tasks,
Research news on AI and creativity
author: Louise Vennells
sauce: University of Exeter
contact: Louise Vennells – University of Exeter
image: Image courtesy of Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“AI will increase individual creativity but reduce content diversity” by Oliver Hauser et al. Scientific advances
Abstract
AI boosts individual creativity but reduces content diversity
Creativity is at the core of what makes us human. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), including powerful large-scale language models (LLMs), promises to either increase creativity by allowing humans to contribute new ideas, or decrease it by sticking to the generative AI's ideas.
We studied the causal effects of generative AI ideas on short story production in an online experiment where some writers got their story ideas from a law master's program. We found that access to generative AI ideas led to stories being rated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers.
However, stories powered by generative AI are more similar to each other than stories written by humans alone. These results suggest that while individual creativity increases, there is a risk of collective novelty being lost. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: with generative AI, writers individually gain an advantage, but the range of novel content they can collectively produce is reduced.
Our findings have implications for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners interested in enhancing creativity.
