To be human is to be creative.
The machines just can’t compete. Can they?
A study has found that writing with AI assistance can make stories more creative, better written, more enjoyable and, at the very least, less boring.
But there is a limit to the lift from AI. Work from the most creative writers doesn’t improve with machine help.
Researchers from the University of Exeter and the UCL School of Management asked 300 people to write a short story of eight sentences to be read by young adults.
The scientists describe their work as a first step to understanding the relationship between generative AI and human creativity.
The research has implications for copyright and for those who rely on creativity for their livelihood, including those in advertising.
The writers strike in the US last year had as an issue the use of AI to transform original work, that created by human writers, into new works.
In Australia, publishers, journalist and writers object to their original works being used to train AI, essentially helping create a billion dollar industry without being paid for it.
Writing is only one form of human expression but its use is widespread, and includes business plans, sales pitches and advertising campaigns, not just books, screenwriting and game creation.
AI can be used to enhance creativity by generating ideas, as a springboard, a potential starting point for storylines.
However, the researchers believe a writer doing this all the time could become anchored to an idea, restricting the flow of other ideas.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that AI made less creative work up to 26.6% better written and 15.2% less boring.
Access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers, the study found.
“This is a first step in studying a question fundamental to all human behaviour: how does generative AI affect human creativity?” said Oliver Hauser, Professor of Economics at the University of Exeter.
“Our results provide insight into how generative AI can enhance creativity, and removes any disadvantage or advantage based on the writers’ inherent creativity.”
However, the researchers found a risk of losing collective novelty, that stories would become less unique in aggregate and more similar to each other.
“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,” said Hauser.
“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.”
The study asked 600 people to judge the stories on novelty and usefulness for the target audience and whether they should be published.
Writers with the most access to AI had their stories scored 8.1% higher for novelty and 9% higher for usefulness compared with stories written without machine help.
Writers using up to five AI-generated ideas scored higher for emotional characteristics, producing stories that were better written, more enjoyable, less boring and funnier.
How the study was conducted:
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