Books and movies of the future could start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned.
The research, which relied on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid growing fears about the impact of widely available artificial intelligence tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing.
“Our aim was to study to what extent and how genetic artificial intelligence could help people with creativity,” co-author Anil Doshi of 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 come up with 10 drastically different words.
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The scientists then randomly divided them into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three themes: an adventure on the high seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet.
Participants were also randomly assigned to three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance.
The first group received no help, the second received a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them move forward.
Individual gain, collective loss
After completing their stories, participants were asked to rate the creativity of their work through measures such as how original it was, how enjoyable it was, and how likely the idea was to become a published book.
An additional 600 external human judges also judged the story using the same measures.
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The authors found that, on average, the AI ββboosted the quality of an individual writer’s creativity by up to 10 percent and the enjoyment of the story by 22 percent, particularly helping elements such as structure and plot twists.
These effects were more significant for writers who were judged in the original work to be the least creative, “so it has this kind of level playing field effect,” Doshi said.
But collectively, they found that the AI-assisted stories were much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI assistance, as the writers became very “anchored” to the suggested ideas.
Hauser said this created a “social dilemma”. On the one hand, “make it easier for people to get in; lowering barriers is good.” But if the collective innovation of art diminishes, “it could be harmful down the line.”
Doshi said the research also showed that, just as introducing pocket calculators to children too early could prevent them from learning how to do basic arithmetic, there was a risk that humans would rely too much on AI tools before developing the underlying skills in writing, music or more.
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People need to start thinking “where in my workflow can I introduce this tool to get the most benefit while still injecting my own voice into the project or the outcome”.
Source: AFP