Stories with AI ideas: higher ratings, but more alike
Among 293 writers and 600 evaluators, the improvement was greater for those who started with lower scores on a creativity test.
The key idea
With AI ideas available, stories received higher ratings and, considered together, were more similar in meaning.
The study, in plain language
To see what changes when someone receives an idea to get started, the team asked people to write short stories with access to no GPT-4 suggestions, one suggestion, or several. Other people then read the stories without knowing how they had been created and rated them.
With ideas available, stories received higher ratings for novelty and usefulness, especially among those who started with lower scores on a creativity test. Looking across all the stories revealed the other side: the assisted stories were more similar to one another in meaning. Both things happened at once, one at the level of each story and the other across the collection. Greater similarity does not prove plagiarism or a lasting loss of creativity.
What they found
- Stories with AI ideas available received higher ratings for novelty and usefulness.
- The improvements were greater among people who started with lower scores on the creativity test.
- The assisted stories were more similar to one another in meaning; this does not prove plagiarism.
Something to think about
If an AI idea helps you start a story, ask yourself which parts bring in something of your own and which lead you down a familiar path.
How they studied it
In an online experiment, 293 people wrote eight-sentence stories in English with access to no GPT-4 ideas, one idea, or up to five ideas. Then 600 evaluators rated the stories without knowing which condition they came from. To compare how similar the stories were to one another, the team used semantic representations of the stories.
What the study cannot show
- The study examined eight-sentence stories in English written by participants in the United Kingdom.
- The intervention provided access to GPT-4 ideas, not an open-ended conversation or every statistical analysis.
- Novelty and usefulness do not represent every aspect of creative ability.
- Greater similarity is not the same as plagiarism and does not prove a lasting loss of creativity.
The original study
Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content
Source under CC BY 4.0. English adaptation and explanation by PaperFlow, with AI assistance. The text has been reorganized for a general audience; it is not the complete paper and does not imply endorsement by its authors.
One study alone does not represent a field's consensus. Educational content does not replace professional advice. Report a possible error.
