According to research, stories created with the help of ChatGPT are more creative than stories written by writers who do not use the tool, and engage their audience with more plot twists.
However, the researchers also found that stories written by writers using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reduced diversity, increasing the risk of “mass novelty.”
GenAI can generate content – text, images, audio or video – and is based on big language models that are trained on massive amounts of text data and can, therefore, process, interpret and respond to requests in the natural language that humans use to communicate.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that naturally more creative writers benefited the least from the ideas generated by ChatGPT, while less creative writers became more creative due to the ideas suggested by the GenAI model.
Therefore, the AI ”effectively equalized creativity” among all writers, the team of researchers said.
“While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is a risk of losing collective innovation. If the publishing industry adopts more creative AI-inspired stories, our findings suggest that stories will overall become less unique and more similar to each other,” said study author Anil Doshi, an assistant professor at the School of Management at University College London in the UK.
For the study, 300 participants were tasked with writing a short, eight-sentence story (a ‘microstory’) for a target audience of young adults, 600 of whom were recruited to evaluate the writers’ work.
The writers were divided into three groups. The first group was not given any help from the AI, while the second group was allowed to pick an idea with the first three sentences of a story created by ChatGPT for inspiration. The third group was allowed to choose from five story ideas created by the AI.
The authors found that the work of writers who used AI was 8-9 percent more novel than those who did not rely on AI. Along with novelty, the microstories were also judged for “usefulness” – were they engaging enough for the audience, and could they potentially be developed and published?
The team also found that less creative writers became even more creative, and that AI made their stories 10.7 percent more innovative and 11.5 percent more useful, compared to stories written by writers who did not receive AI help.
The authors found that AI made the work of less creative writers 26.6 percent better, 22.6 percent more enjoyable, and 15.2 percent less boring.
The authors’ underlying creativity was measured using a psychological test – the Divergent Association Task (DAT).
Divergent thinking, which allows a person to spontaneously think of multiple solutions to a problem, is thought to be important for creativity.
Additionally, the authors found that stories produced by writers who used GenAI’s ideas were 10.7 percent more similar than those produced by writers who did not use AI.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)