Gen AI boosts individual creativity at the cost of collective diversity, study finds

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Image credit: VentureBeat with DALL-E 3 Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has sparked debate about their impact on creativity and the creation of novel ideas. A new study by researchers from the University of College London School of Management and the University of Exeter explores the effect of generative models on creative writing. The study examined how access to story ideas generated by large language models (LLMs) affected the creativity of short stories written by humans. The results are nuanced. While generative AI led to stories that were rated as more creative, engaging and better written, it also resulted in stories that were more similar to each other. Measuring the impact of generative AI on creative writing The study focused on short story writing. The participants were asked to write a short, eight-sentence story about a randomly assigned subject. The researchers measured creativity based on novelty and usefulness. Novelty measures “the extent to which an idea departs from the status quo or expectations.” On the other hand, usefulness is “the practicality and relevance of an idea.” For short stories, usefulness might translate to the story becoming “a publishable product, such as a book, if developed further.” The researchers hypothesized that generative AI can affect creative writing in two ways. On the one hand, it may be used as a “springboard for the human mind, providing potential starting points that can result in a ‘tree structure’ of different storylines” or help writers overcome writer’s block. “If this is the case, we would expect generative AI to lead to more creative written output generated by human writers,” they write. On the other hand, generative AI may anchor the writer to a specific idea and “restrict the variability of a writer’s own ideas from the start, inhibiting the extent of creative writing.” “If this is the case, we would expect generative AI to lead to more similar stories and potentially less creative written output generated by human writers,” they write. […]

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