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One million monkeys at typewriters, meet nearly 300 human writers with AI chatbots.
The authors of a recent study published in Science Advances aimed to test the creative capabilities of generative AI tools by tasking hundreds of nonprofessional writers with creating short stories aided by the latest version of ChatGPT. They then asked 600 reviewers to judge that work across measures like usefulness, novelty, and emotional characteristics.
What they found presented something of a “social dilemma.” While the AI tool did improve creativity on an individual level—at least by the metrics the study laid out—it led to less variation and originality across the pool as a whole. That means that people might be incentivized to use AI, with the possible collective result being a sea of sameness.
“In short, our results suggest that despite the enhancement effect that generative AI had on individual creativity, there may be a cautionary note if generative AI were adopted more widely for creative tasks,” the authors wrote.
A mixed bag: Whether brainstorming ideas or plastering some early words across a blank page, many of the use cases proposed for AI assistants are creative in nature. Creative and marketing agencies have been among the early adopters of language models for tasks like these.
But the technology has also faced pushback from authors who say it’s led to a glut of generated scam books, as well as copyright lawsuits from news publishers and authors. The sci-fi short story publisher Clarkesworld had to temporarily close submissions last year after being overwhelmed by a deluge of AI-generated entries.
More similarities: The study found that accessing generative AI did help its pool of nonprofessional writers spruce up their output, with the effect being greater for writers who were judged as less creative on their own.
But the researchers also determined that having access to AI makes a story much more likely to be similar to others from writers with access to generative AI, based on a specific metric the researchers devised called a similarity score.
The study said that this tendency could lead to less creativity overall as industries embrace this technology.
“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,” the authors wrote.