AI as a Creative Writing Tool: Effective but Potentially Limiting, Study Finds

Study of AI as a creative writing helper finds that it works, but there's a catch

A new experiment in writing shows the limits of AI-driven 'creativity.' Researchers are exploring the existential implications of generative AI, including whether or not the advancing technology will actually make humans more creatively capable -- or narrow our views. The new study, published in Science Advances by two University College London and University of Exeter researchers, tested hundreds of short stories created solely by humans against those created with the creative help of ChatGPT's generative AI. One group of writers had access solely to their own ideas, a second group could ask ChatGPT for one story idea, and a third could work with a set of five ChatGPT made prompts. The stories were then rated on "novelty, usefulness (i.e. likelihood of publishing), and emotional enjoyment," reported TechCrunch. "These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty," the study reads. "This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced." Participants were "measured" for creativity prior to the writing session with a commonly used word-production task that builds a standard of creativity among respondents. Those who tested lower on these creativity proxy tests received better scores on their personal writing when given access to AI-generated ideas. But for those with already high creativity scores, AI ideas had little to no benefit on their story ratings. Additionally, the pool of stories aided by AI-generated prompts were deemed to be less diverse and displayed less unique writing characteristics, suggesting the limits of ChatGPT's all-around ingenuity. The new study's literary findings add to concerns about AI's self-consuming training loops, or the problem of AI models trained only on AI outputs degrading AI models themselves, Mashable's Cecily Mauran reported. Study author Oliver Hauser said in a comment to TechCrunch: "Our study represents an early view on a very big question on how large language models and generative AI more generally will affect human activities, including creativity... It will be important that AI is actually being evaluated rigorously -- rather than just implemented widely, under the assumption that it will have positive outcomes."

Study of AI as a creative writing helper finds that it works, but there's a catch

Researchers are testing the limits of AI-generated creativity. Credit: Didem Mente / Anadolu via Getty Images Researchers are exploring the existential implications of generative AI, including whether or not the advancing technology will actually make humans more creatively capable -- or narrow our views. The new study, published in Science Advances by two University College London and University of Exeter researchers, tested hundreds of short stories created solely by humans against those created with the creative help of ChatGPT's generative AI. One group of writers had access solely to their own ideas, a second group could ask ChatGPT for one story idea, and a third could work with a set of five ChatGPT made prompts. The stories were then rated on "novelty, usefulness (i.e. likelihood of publishing), and emotional enjoyment," reported TechCrunch. "These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty," the study reads. "This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced." Participants were "measured" for creativity prior to the writing session with a commonly used word-production task that builds a standard of creativity among respondents. Those who tested lower on these creativity proxy tests received better scores on their personal writing when given access to AI-generated ideas. But for those with already high creativity scores, AI ideas had little to no benefit on their story ratings. Additionally, the pool of stories aided by AI-generated prompts were deemed to be less diverse and displayed less unique writing characteristics, suggesting the limits of ChatGPT's all-around ingenuity. The new study's literary findings add to concerns about AI's self-consuming training loops, or the problem of AI models trained only on AI outputs degrading AI models themselves, Mashable's Cecily Mauran reported. Study author Oliver Hauser said in a comment to TechCrunch: "Our study represents an early view on a very big question on how large language models and generative AI more generally will affect human activities, including creativity... It will be important that AI is actually being evaluated rigorously -- rather than just implemented widely, under the assumption that it will have positive outcomes."

Study of AI as a creative writing helper finds that it works, but there's a catch

A new experiment in writing shows the limits of AI-driven 'creativity.' Researchers are exploring the existential implications of generative AI, including whether or not the advancing technology will actually make humans more creatively capable -- or narrow our views. The new study, published in Science Advances by two University College London and University of Exeter researchers, tested hundreds of short stories created solely by humans against those created with the creative help of ChatGPT's generative AI. One group of writers had access solely to their own ideas, a second group could ask ChatGPT for one story idea, and a third could work with a set of five ChatGPT made prompts. The stories were then rated on "novelty, usefulness (i.e. likelihood of publishing), and emotional enjoyment," reported TechCrunch. "These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty," the study reads. "This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced." Participants were "measured" for creativity prior to the writing session with a commonly used word-production task that builds a standard of creativity among respondents. Those who tested lower on these creativity proxy tests received better scores on their personal writing when given access to AI-generated ideas. But for those with already high creativity scores, AI ideas had little to no benefit on their story ratings. Additionally, the pool of stories aided by AI-generated prompts were deemed to be less diverse and displayed less unique writing characteristics, suggesting the limits of ChatGPT's all-around ingenuity. The new study's literary findings add to concerns about AI's self-consuming training loops, or the problem of AI models trained only on AI outputs degrading AI models themselves, Mashable's Cecily Mauran reported. Study author Oliver Hauser said in a comment to TechCrunch: "Our study represents an early view on a very big question on how large language models and generative AI more generally will affect human activities, including creativity... It will be important that AI is actually being evaluated rigorously -- rather than just implemented widely, under the assumption that it will have positive outcomes."

AI makes writing easier, but stories sound alike

Books and movies of the future could all start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned. - Individual benefit, collective loss - After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work's creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book.Books and movies of the future could all start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned. The research, which drew on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid rising fears over the impact of widely available AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing. "Our goal was to study to what extent and how generative AI might help humans with creativity," co-author Anil Doshi of the University College London told AFP. For their experiment, Doshi and co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers as "writers." These were people who didn't write for a living, and their inherent creative ability was assessed by a standard psychology test that asked them to provide 10 drastically different words. The scientists then split them randomly into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three topics: an adventure on the open seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet. Participants were also randomly placed into three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance. The first group got no help, the second was provided a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them get going. Individual benefit, collective loss After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work's creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book. An additional 600 external human reviewers also judged the story on the same measures. The authors found that, on average, AI boosted the quality of an individual writer's creativity by up to 10 percent, and the story's enjoyability by 22 percent, helping particularly with elements like structure and plot twists. These effects were most significant for writers who were judged during the initial task to be the least creative, "so it has this kind of leveling the playing field effect," said Doshi. But on the collective level, they found AI-assisted stories looked much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI help, as writers "anchored" themselves too heavily to the suggested ideas. Hauser said this created a "social dilemma." On the one hand, "you make it easier for people to get in; lowering barriers is good." But if the collective novelty of art decreases, "it could be harmful down the line." Doshi said the research also showed that, just like introducing pocket calculators to children too early could prevent them from learning how to do basic arithmetic, there was a danger that people could rely too much on AI tools before developing underlying skills in writing, music or more. People need to start thinking about "where in my workflow can I insert this tool to get the most benefit, while still inserting my own voice into the project or outcome."

Research shows AI can boost creativity for some, but at a cost

Supporters of Artificial Intelligence say it can serve as a muse, but critics doubt it -- they say that it does little more than remix existing work. Now, new research suggests that elements of both arguments are right. AI might be able to help a person become more creative, but it risks decreasing creativity in society overall. Questions have swirled around the use of AI in art since large language models (also known as LLMs) burst on the scene almost two years ago. Companies such as OpenAI have touted their products as tools that artists could use to increase their output. While some writers say they've embraced AI as a tool in their creative process, many other artists and creators have expressed skepticism. Some have even sued, alleging that the tools use copyrighted work for training purposes. Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try and answer the basic question of whether AI could increase creativity. "It does have a sort of incredible ability to sort of come up with content at the click of a button," he says. On the other hand, AI can often produce stories that are similar in nature. "It could be that it's not as creative as you might think, and it doesn't help you be more creative," he says. To try and get some hard data on this squishy question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people, who Doshi says did not identify as professional writers. "We asked them to write a short, eight-sentence story," he says. Around one-third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. Those that got help were divided into two subgroups: one that got a single AI-generated idea, and one that got to choose from up to five. Crucially, Doshi says, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves. "Our intention was to focus on whether AI can help human creativity," Doshi says. "This was not a horse race between AI versus humans." The results were judged by a group of 600 evaluators. They were asked to grade each story on its "novelty" and "usefulness." Novelty was a proxy for the story's originality, while usefulness was a measure of whether the story was high enough quality to be published. The results, published today in the journal Science Advances, found that stories written with AI help were deemed both more novel and useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea did better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest boost - they wrote stories seen as around 8% more novel than humans on their own, and 9% more useful. What's more, Doshi says, the worst writers benefited the most. "Those that were the least inherently creative, experienced the largest improvement in their creativity," he says. So AI really does appear to make people more creative. But there's a plot twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect. "Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had AI," Hauser says. In other words, the chatbot made each individual more creative, but it made the group that had AI help less creative. Hauser describes the divergent result as a "classic social dilemma" -- a situation where people benefit individually, but the group suffers. "We do worry that, at large scale, if many people are using this... overall the diversity and creativity in the population will go down," he says Annalee Newitz, a science fiction author and journalist, questions the findings. Trying to quantify whether a person is more creative is tricky: "I think that part of creativity is that it can't really be measured in percentages like that," Newitz says. Nevertheless, when Newitz tried reproducing some of the AI story ideas themselves using the paper's methods, they clearly saw how using AI would generate similar stories. For example, when asked to produce story ideas for an "adventure on the open seas," they found AI would often incorporate the clichéd idea of finding treasure into the story. And it seemed to latch onto the phrase "the real treasure was..." -- which is a common internet meme. Because AI is trained on a huge number of texts, Newitz says, it seems reasonable that it would draw from those frequently-used clichés first. Newitz also says the social dilemma warned about in the study has already hit the sci-fi community. Last year the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld had to close online submissions because "they were flooded with AI-written stories." In the end, Newitz says that they wouldn't blame anyone who wanted to try using AI to write a story. But ultimately, they think these tools miss the point of writing. Creative writing is "humans communicating with other humans," Newitz says. "Even if something is badly written -- even if it's not very creative -- if it's written by a human, then it's fulfilling its purpose."

AI prompts can boost writers' creativity but result in similar stories, study finds

Ideas generated by ChatGPT can help writers who lack inherent flair but may mean there are fewer unique ideas Once upon a time, all stories were written solely by humans. Now, researchers have found AI might help authors tell a tale. A study suggests that ideas generated by the AI system ChatGPT can help boost the creativity of writers who lack inherent flair - albeit at the expense of variety. Prof Oliver Hauser, a co-author of the research from the University of Exeter, said the results pose a social dilemma. "It may be individually beneficial for you to use AI, but as a society if everyone used AI, we might all lose out on the diversity of unique ideas," he said. "And, arguably, for creative endeavours we might sometimes need the 'wild' and 'unusual' ideas." The team asked 293 people to name 10 words that differed as much as possible from each other, allowing them to probe participants' inherent creativity. The researchers then randomly assigned participants one of three topics - an adventure in the jungle, on the open seas or on a different planet - and asked them to write an eight-sentence story appropriate for teenagers and young adults. While a third of participants were offered no assistance, the others were split between those allowed to have one three-sentence starting idea pre-generated by ChatGPT, and those who could request five such ideas. Overall, 82 of 100 participants took up the offer of a single AI-generated idea, while 93 of 98 participants offered access to five such ideas took at least one - and almost a quarter requested all five. A further 600 participants, unaware of whether AI-generated ideas were used, read the resulting stories, and rated factors relating to novelty and usefulness - such as whether the story was publishable - on a nine-point scale. The results, published in the journal Science Advances, reveal access to AI boosted these scores, with greater access associated with a larger effect: people with the option of five AI-generated ideas had an 8.1% increase, on average, in novelty ratings for their stories compared with people lacking the option of such help, while usefulness ratings rose by 9% on average. "The effect sizes are not very large, but they were statistically significant," said Dr Anil Doshi, a co-author of the study from University College London. Stories written by people with the option of AI-generated ideas were also deemed more enjoyable, more likely to have plot twists and be better written. However, it was writers with low inherent creativity that benefited most. "We do not find that the most inherently creative people's stories are being "supercharged" from AI ideas - this group of people is highly creative with and without the use of AI," said Doshi. The team also found participants with access to AI-generated ideas produced stories with greater similarity, something Doshi suggested is down to AI generating relatively predictable story ideas. Hauser said such studies are important. "Evaluating the use of AI will be essential in making sure that we reap the benefits of this potentially transformative technology without falling prey to potential shortcomings," he said.

AI Makes Writing Easier, But Stories Sound Alike

Books and movies of the future could all start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned. The research, which drew on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid rising fears over the impact of widely available AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing. "Our goal was to study to what extent and how generative AI might help humans with creativity," co-author Anil Doshi of the University College London told AFP. For their experiment, Doshi and co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers as "writers." These were people who didn't write for a living, and their inherent creative ability was assessed by a standard psychology test that asked them to provide 10 drastically different words. The scientists then split them randomly into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three topics: an adventure on the open seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet. Participants were also randomly placed into three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance. The first group got no help, the second was provided a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them get going. After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work's creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book. An additional 600 external human reviewers also judged the story on the same measures. The authors found that, on average, AI boosted the quality of an individual writer's creativity by up to 10 percent, and the story's enjoyability by 22 percent, helping particularly with elements like structure and plot twists. These effects were most significant for writers who were judged during the initial task to be the least creative, "so it has this kind of leveling the playing field effect," said Doshi. But on the collective level, they found AI-assisted stories looked much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI help, as writers "anchored" themselves too heavily to the suggested ideas. Hauser said this created a "social dilemma." On the one hand, "you make it easier for people to get in; lowering barriers is good." But if the collective novelty of art decreases, "it could be harmful down the line." Doshi said the research also showed that, just like introducing pocket calculators to children too early could prevent them from learning how to do basic arithmetic, there was a danger that people could rely too much on AI tools before developing underlying skills in writing, music or more. People need to start thinking about "where in my workflow can I insert this tool to get the most benefit, while still inserting my own voice into the project or outcome."

AI Enhances Story Creativity but Risks Reducing Novelty - Neuroscience News

Summary: A new study shows that AI helps make stories more creative, engaging, and well-written, especially for less creative writers. The research found that AI assistance boosts novelty and usefulness, making stories more enjoyable and less boring. However, it also warns that the widespread use of AI may reduce the diversity and uniqueness of creative works. The findings highlight both the potential and risks of using AI in creative writing. 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." AI found to boost individual creativity - at the expense of less varied content Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) -- including powerful large language models (LLMs) -- holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on generative AI ideas. We study the causal impact of generative AI ideas on the production of short stories in an online experiment where some writers obtained story ideas from an LLM. We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However, generative AI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity.

Experiment finds AI boosts creativity individually -- but lowers it collectively | TechCrunch

A new study examines whether AI could be an automated helpmeet in creative tasks, with mixed results: it appeared to help less naturally creative people write more original stories -- but dampened the creativity of the group as a whole. It's a trade-off that may be increasingly common as AI tools impinge on creative endeavors. The study is from researchers Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser at University College London and University of Exeter respectively, published in Science Advances. And while it's necessarily limited due to its focus on short stories, it seems to confirm the feeling many have expressed: that AI can be helpful but ultimately offers nothing truly new in creative endeavors. "Our study represents an early view on a very big question on how large language models and generative AI more generally will affect human activities, including creativity," Hauser told TechCrunch in an email. "While there is huge potential (and, no doubt, huge hype) for this technology to have big impacts in media and creativity more generally, it will be important that AI is actually being evaluated rigorously -- rather than just implemented widely, under the assumption that it will have positive outcomes." The experiment had hundreds of people write very short stories (8 sentences or so), on any topic but suitable for a broad audience. One group just wrote; a second group was given the opportunity to consult GPT-4 for a single story idea with a few sentences (they could use as much or as little as they liked); a third could get up to five such story starters. Once the stories were written, they were evaluated by both their own writers and a second group that knew nothing about the generative AI twist. These people rated the stories on novelty, usefulness (i.e. likelihood of publishing), and emotional enjoyment. Prior to writing the stories, the participants also completed a word-production task that acts as a proxy for creativity. It's a concept that can't be directly measured, but in this case one's creativity in writing can at least be approximated (without judgment! Not everyone is a born or practiced writer). "Capturing something so rich and complex as creativity with any measure seems fraught with complications," wrote Hauser. "There is, however, a rich set of research around human creativity and there is a live debate about how best to capture the idea of creativity in a measure." They said their approach was widely used in academia and well documented in other studies. What the researchers found was that people with lower creativity metrics scored lowest on evaluations of their stories, which arguably validates the approach. They also saw the largest gains when given the opportunity to use a generated story idea (which, it's worth noting, the vast majority across the experiment did). Stories by people with a low creativity score who just wrote were reliably rated lower than others on writing quality, enjoyability, and novelty. Given one AI-generated idea, they scored higher on every metric. Given the choice of five, they scored even higher. It really appears that for folks struggling with the creative side of writing (at least within this context and definition), the AI helper is genuinely improving the quality of their work. This probably resonates with many to whom writing does not come naturally, and a language model saying "hey, try this" is the prompt they need to finish a paragraph or start a new chapter. But what about the people who scored highly on the creativity metric? Did their writing climb to new heights? Sadly, no. In fact, those participants saw little to no benefit at all, or even (though it's very close and arguably not significant) worse ratings. It seems that those on the creative side produced their best work when they had no AI help at all. One can imagine any number of reasons why this might be the case, but the numbers do suggest that, in this situation, AI had a zero to negative effect on writers with innate creativity. But that's not the part that the researchers were worried about. Beyond the subjective evaluation of stories by participants, the researchers conducted some analyses of their own. They used OpenAI's embeddings API to rate how similar each story was to the other stories in its category (i.e. human-only, one AI option, or five AI options). They found that access to generative AI caused the resulting stories to be closer to the average for their category. In other words, they were more similar and less varied as a group. The total difference was in the 9-10% range, so it's not like the stories were all clones of one another. And who knows but this similarity might be an artifact of less practiced writers finishing a suggested story versus more creative writers coming up with one from scratch. The finding was nevertheless enough to warrant a cautionary note in the conclusions, which I could not condense and so quote in full: While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is risk of losing collective novelty. In general equilibrium, an interesting question is whether the stories enhanced and inspired by AI will be able to create sufficient variation in the outputs they lead to. Specifically, if the publishing (and self-publishing) industry were to embrace more generative AI-inspired stories, our findings suggest that the produced 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. 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. It echoes the fear in visual art and in web content that if the AI leads to more AI, and what it trains on is just more of itself, it could end up in a self-perpetuating cycle of blandness. As generative AI begins to creep into every medium, it is studies like these that act as counterweights to claims of unbounded creativity or new eras of AI-generated films and songs. Hauser and Doshi acknowledge that their work is just the beginning -- the field is brand new, and every study, including their own, is limited. "There are a number of paths that we expect future research to pick up on. For instance, implementation of generative AI 'in the wild' will look very different than our controlled setting," Hauser wrote. "Ideally, our study helps guide both the technology and how we interact with it to ensure continued diversity of creative ideas, whether it is in writing, or art, or music."

AI can make you more creative -- but it has limits

The model was helpful -- but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. The research adds to the growing body of work investigating how generative AI affects human creativity, suggesting that although access to AI can offer a creative boost to an individual, it reduces creativity in the aggregate. To understand generative AI's effect on humans' creativity, we first need to determine how creativity is measured. This study used two metrics: novelty and usefulness. Novelty refers to a story's originality, while usefulness in this context reflects the possibility that each resulting short story could be developed into a book or other publishable work. First, the authors recruited 293 people through the research platform Prolific to complete a task designed to measure their inherent creativity. Participants were instructed to provide 10 words that were as different from each other as possible.