AI boosts individual creativity – at the expense of less varied content

The study, published in Science Advances, found that AI enhanced creativity by boosting the novelty of story ideas as well as the ‘usefulness’ of stories, which describes their ability to engage the target audience and their publication potential. The research also found that that AI ‘professionalised’ stories, making them more enjoyable, more likely to have plot twists and be less boring.

In the experiment, researchers from UCL and the University of Exeter asked 300 participants – who were not professional writers – to write a short, eight-sentence ‘micro story’ for a target audience of young adults.

The participants were assigned to one of three groups: one group was allowed no AI help, a second group could use ChatGPT to provide a single three-sentence starting idea, and writers in the third group could choose from up to five AI-generated ideas for their inspiration.

The team then asked 600 people to judge how good the stories were, assessing them for novelty (whether the stories did something new or unexpected) and ‘usefulness’ (how appropriate they were for the target audience and whether the ideas could be developed for publication).

They found that writers with the most access to AI experienced the greatest creative gains, with their stories scoring 8.1% higher for novelty and 9% higher for usefulness compared with stories written without AI.

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

The researchers evaluated the writers’ inherent creativity using a Divergent Association Task (DAT, a psychology test designed to assess creativity, and found that more creative writers – those with the highest DAT scores – benefitted least from generative AI ideas.

Less creative writers conversely saw a greater increase in creativity: access to five AI ideas improved novelty by 10.7% and usefulness by 11.5% compared with those who used no AI ideas. Their stories were judged to be up to 26.6% better written, up to 22.6%, more enjoyable and up to 15.2% less boring.

These improvements put writers with low DAT scores on a par with those with high DAT scores, effectively equalising creativity across the less and more creative writers.

The researchers also used OpenAI’s embeddings application programming interface (API) to calculate how similar the stories were to each other.

They found a 10.7% increase in similarity between writers whose stories used one generative AI-idea, compared with the group that didn’t use AI.

Professor Oliver Hauser, an author of the study from the University of Exeter Business School and Deputy Director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, said: “This is a first step in studying a question fundamental to all human behaviour: how does generative AI affect human creativity?

“Our results provide insight into how generative AI can enhance creativity, and removes any disadvantage or advantage based on the writers’ inherent creativity.”

Dr Anil Doshi, an author of the study from UCL School of Management, said: “While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is risk of losing collective novelty. If the publishing industry were to embrace more generative AI-inspired stories, our findings suggest that the stories would become less unique in aggregate and more similar to each other.”

Professor Hauser cautioned: “This downward spiral shows parallels to an emerging social dilemma: if individual writers find out that their generative AI-inspired writing is evaluated as more creative, they have an incentive to use generative AI more in the future, but by doing so the collective novelty of stories may be reduced further.

“In short, our results suggest that despite the enhancement effect that generative AI had on individual creativity, there may be a cautionary note if generative AI were adopted more widely for creative tasks.”

Links

• Dr Anil Doshi's academic profile
• UCL School of Management 
• UCL Faculty of Engineering

Image

Credit: Demianastur on iStock.

Media contact

Dr Matt Midgley

E: m.midgley [at] ucl.ac.uk