Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content

Source: Science Advances 10(28) eadn5290 (Doshi, Hauser; UCL / University of Exeter) · 2024-07-12

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.

Generative AI can enhance the creativity of short stories but may limit the variation in diverse outputs.

Taking a first step toward understanding the relationship between generative AI and human creativity, we focus specifically on the role of generative AI on affecting creative output through the expression of short (or micro) fiction. While creating written output is only one form of human expression, its use is widespread across the economy (e.g., business plans, sales pitches, or marketing campaigns) and society (e.g., books and social media). Here, we study how generative AI affects participants’ ability to produce this particular type of creative written output (9). While we did not introduce financial incentives for performance or creativity [as they have previously led to mixed results (10)], we provided guidance to authors to write a story on a randomly assigned topic and gave instructions on the length of the story and the target audience.

Creativity is typically assessed across two dimensions: novelty and usefulness (11, 12). Because the two were designed for other creativity tasks [such as idea generation, see (13), or physical design task, see (11)], we slightly adjusted some components of the constructs. Novelty assesses the extent to which an idea departs from the status quo or expectations. In our study, following the previous literature, the novelty index captured the story’s novelty, originality, and rarity. Usefulness reflects the practicality and relevance of an idea, which we interpret as the possibility that this short story could become a publishable product, such as a book, if developed further: Therefore, our usefulness index was adjusted to capture the story’s appropriateness for the targeted audience, feasibility of being developed into a complete book, and likelihood of a publisher developing the book.

There are at least two ways in which the availability of generative AI can affect creative writing in this context. On the one hand, generative AI may enhance: Generated ideas from AI may be used as a “springboard” for the human mind, providing potential starting points that can result in a “tree structure” of different storylines (3, 14). It can also offer multiple starting venues that help a human writer overcome “writer’s block” and the fear of a blank page (15). If this is the case, we would expect generative AI to lead to more creative written output generated by human writers.

Conversely, generative AI may hamper: By anchoring the writer to a specific idea, or starting point for a story, generative AI may restrict the variability of a writer’s own ideas from the start, inhibiting the extent of creative writing. Moreover, the output offered by generative AI may be derivative and thus not provide a fertile ground for new and creative ideas. If this is the case, we would expect generative AI to lead to more similar stories and potentially less creative written output generated by human writers. Note that these two pathways in which generative AI can affect creative writing may not be mutually exclusive: It is possible that generative AI enhances a human’s ability to write creative stories in some ways (e.g., novelty) but not in others (e.g., usefulness) (12).

This paper aims to provide an initial answer to these questions through a preregistered, two-phase experimental online study on written creative output (see Fig. 1 for the experimental design and Materials and Methods for details) (16). In the first phase of our study, we recruited a group of N = 293 participants (“writers”) who are asked to write a short, eight-sentence story that is “appropriate for a teenage and young adult audience,” and we indicate to writers, “You can write about anything you like.” [We drew inspiration from the emergence of the “micro” genre in creative outputs, including “microfiction” (17) and “micro-videos” (18) where creativity emerges amidst brevity; indeed, the famous “six-word story” often attributed to Ernest Hemingway highlights the creative power of a concise plot (19).] Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Human-only, Human with one GenAI idea condition, and Human with five GenAI ideas (see table S1 for balance across conditions).

(A) Participants are recruited, provide consent to participate in the study, and complete the divergent association task (DAT)—a measure of an individual’s inherent creativity (25)—before being randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: a Human-only condition where the story was written with no generative AI assistance, a Human with one GenAI idea condition, and a Human with five GenAI ideas condition. A total of 293 stories are collected and then passed to evaluators. (B) Evaluators provide ratings on six randomly assigned stories. The evaluators cycle through each story three times.