AI found to boost individual creativity – at the expense of less varied content

Stories written with AI assistance have been deemed to be more creative, better written and more enjoyable.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances finds that AI enhances creativity by boosting the novelty of story ideas as well as the ‘usefulness’ of stories – their ability to engage the target audience and potential for publication.

It finds that AI “professionalizes” stories, making them more enjoyable, more likely to have plot twists, better written and less boring.

In a study in which 300 participants were tasked with writing a short, eight-sentence ‘micro story’ for a target audience of young adults, researchers found that AI made those deemed less creative produce work that was up to 26.6% better written and 15.2% less boring.

However, AI was not judged to enhance the work produced by more creative writers.

The study also warns that while AI may enhance individual creativity it may also result in a loss of collective novelty, as AI-assisted stories were found to contain more similarities to each other and were less varied and diverse.

The researchers, from the University of Exeter Business School and Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence as well as the UCL School of Management, assigned the 300 study participants to 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.

They then recruited 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 and potentially published.

They found that writers with the most access to AI experienced the greatest gains to their creativity, their stories scoring 8.1% higher for novelty and 9% higher for novelty 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) 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.

Oliver Hauser, Professor of Economics at 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.”

Anil Doshi, Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management added: “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.”

'Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content’ by Professor Oliver Hauser from the University of Exeter Business School and Professor Anil Doshi from the UCL School of Management, is published in Science Advances.