AI boosts creativity and reduces content variety


Stories written with the help of AI are considered more creative, better written and more enjoyable.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances finds that AI enhances creativity by enhancing the novelty of story ideas as well as the “usefulness” of stories – their ability to engage the target audience and their publishability.

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

In a study in which 300 participants were tasked with writing a short, eight-sentence “microstory” aimed at a target audience of young adults, researchers found that AI enabled those considered less creative to produce work that was up to 26.6% better written and 15.2% less boring.

However, AI was not found to improve the work produced by the most creative writers.

The study also warns that while AI can enhance individual creativity, it can also lead to a loss of collective novelty, as AI-assisted stories were found to contain more similarities between them and to be less varied and diverse.

The researchers, from the University of Exeter’s Business School and Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and UCL’s School of Management, divided the 300 study participants into three groups: one group was given no AI help, a second group could use ChatGPT to provide a single three-sentence idea starter, and authors in the third group could choose from five AI-generated ideas for inspiration.

They then recruited 600 people to judge the quality of the stories, assessing their novelty (whether the stories did something new or unexpected) and their “usefulness” (how well they were suited to the target audience and whether the ideas could be developed and potentially published).

They found that authors with the most access to AI experienced the greatest gains in creativity, with their stories scoring 8.1% higher and 9% higher in novelty compared to stories written without AI.

Authors who used up to five AI-generated ideas also performed better on emotional characteristics, producing better-written, more enjoyable, less boring and funnier stories.

The researchers assessed writers’ inherent creativity using a divergent association task (DAT) and found that the most creative writers—those with the highest DAT scores—benefited the least from AI-generating ideas.

Less creative authors, on the other hand, saw their creativity increase more: access to five AI ideas improved novelty by 10.7% and usefulness by 11.5% compared to those who used no AI ideas. Their stories were rated as up to 26.6% better written, up to 22.6% more enjoyable, and up to 15.2% less boring.

These improvements put authors with low DAT scores on an equal footing with those with high DAT scores, effectively equalizing creativity between less and more creative authors.

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

They found a 10.7% increase in similarity between authors whose stories used a generative AI idea, compared to the group that did not 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 investigating a fundamental question for all human behaviour: how does generative AI affect human creativity?

“Our results provide insight into how generative AI can enhance creativity and remove any downsides or advantages based on the inherent creativity of the authors.”

Anil Doshi, Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management, added: “While these results indicate an increase in individual creativity, there is a risk of a loss of collective novelty. If the publishing industry were to adopt more generative AI-inspired stories, our results suggest that stories would become less unique overall and more similar to each other.”

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

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

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

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