Researchers found that AI could increase the creativity of individual writers, but it also led to many similar stories.
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Can an AI chatbot make a person more creative?
Proponents of artificial intelligence say it can serve as a muse, but critics doubt it: They say it does little more than remix existing work.
New research now suggests that both arguments are true. AI can help an individual become more creative, but it risks reducing the creativity of society as a whole.
‘New ideas’
Since large language models (also known as LLMs) first emerged nearly two years ago, questions have been raised about the use of AI in art. Companies like OpenAI have touted their products as tools that artists could use to augment their output. While some artists say they’ve embraced AI as a tool in their creative process, many other artists and creators have expressed skepticism. Some have even filed lawsuits, alleging that the tools use copyrighted works for training purposes.
Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try to answer the fundamental question of whether AI could increase creativity.
“It has an incredible ability to create content at the click of a button,” he says. On the other hand, AI can often produce stories of a similar nature.
“It may not be as creative as you think, and that doesn’t help you be more creative,” he says.
To try to get some hard data on this tricky question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi of the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people who, according to Doshi, didn’t identify as professional writers. “We asked them to write a short story of eight sentences,” he explains.
About a third of the authors had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given initial ideas generated by the ChatGPT 4.0 chatbot. Those who received help were divided into two subgroups: one received a single idea generated by the AI, and the other was able to choose between five ideas.
Doshi explains that the most important thing is that both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves.
“Our goal was to determine whether AI can help human creativity,” Doshi says. “It wasn’t a horse race between AI and humans.”
The results were evaluated by a group of 600 reviewers. They were asked to rate each article on its “novelty” and “usefulness.” Novelty was an indicator of the originality of the article, while usefulness was a measure of how good the article was for publication.
The results, published today in the journal Scientific progress, The authors found that stories written with the help of AI were considered both more innovative and more useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea performed better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest improvement: They wrote stories that were considered about 8% more innovative than humans alone and 9% more useful.
Moreover, Doshi says, it is the worst writers who have benefited most from it.
“Those who were the least creative by nature experienced the greatest improvement in their creativity,” he says.
So it seems that AI is making people more creative. But there’s a twist: When Hauser and Doshi studied all the stories, they found a different effect.
“Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had the AI,” Hauser says.
The Social Dilemma
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 outcome as a “classic social dilemma”—a situation in which individuals benefit individually, but the group suffers.
“We’re concerned that on a large scale, if many people use this… overall, the diversity and creativity of the population will decrease,” he says.
Annalee Newitz, a science fiction author and journalist, questions these findings. It’s hard to determine whether someone is more creative: “I think some of creativity can’t really be measured in percentages,” Newitz says.
However, when Newitz tried to reproduce some of the AI story ideas himself using the methods in the paper, they clearly saw how using AI would generate similar stories.
For example, when asked to generate story ideas for a “deep-sea adventure,” they found that the AI often incorporated 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. Since the AI is trained on a large number of texts, Newitz explains, it makes sense that it would first draw on these commonly used clichés.
Newitz also says the social dilemma warned of in the study has already hit the science fiction community. Last year, science fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to shut down online submissions because it was “inundated with AI-written stories.”
Ultimately, Newitz says they wouldn’t blame anyone who would try to use 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 explains. “Even if something is poorly written, even if it’s not very creative, if it’s written by a human, then it’s accomplished.”
News Source : www.npr.org
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