Research Shows AI Enhances Individual Creativity But Reduces Novelty
The rise of the use of AI Tools has sparked debate about their impact on creativity in recent times. A recent study by the researchers from University of College London School of Management and the University of Exeter has shown that AI tools enhance the creativity of the AI user by boosting the novelty of story ideas.
The research has also further found that AI-generalized stories seem to be more enjoyable with good plot twists. However, the stories generated are more likely to be similar.
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The study was mainly focused on story writing. An experiment was conducted with 300 participants. They were assigned to write a short, eight-sentence ‘micro story’ for a targeted audience of young adults.
The participants were divided into three groups. One group was asked to write without AI help, the 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 generated ideas for their inspiration.
The stories of the participants were then circulated to 600 people to assess them for novelty and usefulness. Surprisingly, the stories written with the most access to AI gained the most credit, with their stories scoring 8.1% higher for novelty and 9% higher for usefulness compared to ones written without AI.
The researchers later evaluated the writer’s inherent creativity using a Divergent Association Test (DAT). The writers with higher DAT scores were less benefitted from AI while the ones with lower DAT scores showed an increase in creativity with the use of AI.
The data showed, “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.”
However, when the researchers used OpenAI’s embedding application programming interface (API) to calculate how similar the stories were to each other, it was found that there was a 10.7% increase in similarity between writers who have used AI tools compared to the ones who did not.
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Professor Oliver Hauser, an author of the study from the University of Exeter Business School and Deputy Director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, said, “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.”
