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AI can potentially help foster creativity for some individuals; however, it dampens creativity when looked at as part of a larger group, according to researchers at the University College London and University of Exeter.
Their experiment, which was published in Science Advances this week, focused on creative writing. Hundreds of people wrote short stories roughly eight sentences in length. One group wrote independently, while the other could use GPT-4 for a story idea, along with a few sentences. One final group got up to five story starters.
Before participants started writing, researchers tested their creativity in a word-production task commonly used in academia. After they turned in their stories, an independent group rated them based on novelty, enjoyment, and whether or not they thought they might be publish-worthy.
In the end, the people with lower creativity scored the weakest on their finished stories, but they saw the most significant gains when they used AI to help them. The more options those people were given, the higher their ultimate score.
On the other hand, people who scored higher on the creativity metric didn't see any benefit to using the AI. In some cases, those writers scored lower. Researchers also discovered that the AI-assisted stories, while better overall, were also similar to each other.
"While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is risk of losing collective novelty," the researchers said. "Specifically, if the publishing (and self-publishing) industry were to embrace more generative AI-inspired stories, our findings suggest that the produced stories would become less unique in aggregate and more similar to each other."