Writers are finding AI useful in coming up with story ideas, sparking creativity, and making content more engaging and professional. However, overuse of the technology may increase the risks of constraining the diversity of collective creative output, according to a new study. In other words, AI could make writing less diverse.

“Generative AI–enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone,” the study said. “These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.

“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,” the researchers added.

The study's authors, Anil Dosh and Oliver P. Hauser, conducted their experiments in different phases. First, they recruited 293 participants to write short stories, dividing them into three groups: human-only, human with one generative AI idea, and human with five generative AI ideas. The generative AI ideas were provided by OpenAI’s GPT-4.

In the second phase, a separate group of 600 participants evaluated the stories on creativity, novelty, usefulness, and emotional characteristics. Scores were collected on criteria like “this story is well written,” “this story has a surprising twist,” and “this story is boring.” To avoid any bias, the evaluators were unaware of the use of generative AI until after their initial assessments.

AI improved the scores on some metrics. For example, one of generative AI's most significant advantages is its ability to "professionalize" content. Stories produced with AI assistance were often described by the evaluators as better written and more enjoyable.

This improvement was particularly pronounced among less inherently creative writers, the study found, leveling the playing field and enabling them to produce work on par with their more creative peers. On the other hand, the study also revealed that naturally creative people didn’t really benefit that much from using AI.

Still, the more AI was used, the better it was for those who needed it.

“We find that, while having access to one generative AI idea leads to somewhat greater creativity, the most gains (and statistically significant differences in our pre-registered indices) come from writers who have access to five generative AI ideas,” the study noted.

Comparing stories

After the test, the researchers looked into how similar the writings were. To do so, they used a series of embeddings obtained from OpenAI’s API. These embeddings helped characterize the content of the text. Then, they quantified the uniqueness of each story by measuring how similar they were to one another using cosine similarity —basically. a metric that evaluates the similarity between two vectors, regardless of their size.

The results showed that stories generated with AI's help are more similar to each other than those created without it. This similarity can be attributed to an “anchoring effect” of the AI-generated ideas, which—while creative—may restrict the variability of writers' own ideas from the start.

“Our results show that having access to generative AI ideas makes a story more similar to the average of other stories within the same condition,” the researchers concluded.

The ethical implications of using AI in creative processes also emerged in the study. Most evaluators in the study found the use of AI in writing stories to be ethical and still a "creative act." However, they imposed a penalty on writers who used AI, suggesting that transparency and fair credit are essential in AI-assisted creative works.

"Most evaluators indicated that disclosure of the use of AI or the underlying text from AI should be part of publications that used such tools," the study notes.

The issue of ethics in the intersection between AI and art has gained relevance as generative AI tools improve their capacities.

The future of creativity in the age of AI presents a potential self-fulfilling prophecy. Less creative individuals may increasingly resort to AI to overcome creative blocks, potentially diminishing their ability to exercise their own talents and fostering reliance on technology over intellect. A recent study published by the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education recently warned that "use of ChatGPT was likely to develop tendencies for procrastination and memory loss and dampen the students' academic performance."

Given the influence of generative AI today, this trend could easily extend beyond academia, potentially impacting all fields that value creativity. Understanding and addressing these dynamics would allow artists to harness the full potential of generative AI while safeguarding the irreplaceable essence of humanity.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.