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Creativity of AI text robots has limits

Artificial intelligence (AI) can increase the creativity of individual stories, but leads to less varied content when used multiple times. This is the key finding of a scientific study published in the journal "Science Advances".

It shows that AI can generate good story ideas for stories that are perceived as novel and useful by the audience. However, according to the study, AI-supported stories are more similar to each other and less diverse than works written without AI support.

The study was conducted at the University of Exeter Business School, the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Exeter and the UCL School of Management in London. In the first phase, the researchers divided 300 test subjects into three groups: The first group wrote without AI help, the second used ChatGPT with the latest language model 4.o for a starting idea, and the third group selected from up to five AI-generated ideas. These were short stories for young adults.

Wear and tear effects
In a second phase of the study, 600 people rated the quality of the stories according to novelty or creativity and usefulness. The results showed that authors with access to AI achieved 8.1 percent higher creativity and nine percent higher usefulness than the control group without the use of AI. Authors who had rated themselves as less creative benefited in particular from the AI support: their stories were rated by the audience as up to 26.6 percent more elegantly written and 15.2 percent less boring.

The texts from the chat robot ChatGPT were therefore able to help less creative authors. However, the creativity of ChatGPT wears off quickly because the computer-generated stories are more similar to each other than texts formulated purely by humans. The researchers found that the similarity between the stories of the authors who used AI increased by 10.7 percent.

"Downward spiral"
Professor Oliver Hauser from the University of Exeter Business School explained: "Our results show how generative AI can boost creativity, but also that it could reduce collective novelty." Hauser spoke of a "downward spiral" that could lead to a social dilemma.

"If individual authors find out that their writing inspired by generative AI is judged to be more creative, they have an incentive to use more generative AI in the future." However, this could further reduce the collective novelty of stories. "Our results suggest that despite the enhancement effect that generative AI had on individual creativity, caution may be warranted if generative AI were to be used more widely for creative tasks."

Anil Doshi from the UCL School of Management added: "If the publishing industry adopts more generative AI-inspired stories, they could become less unique and more similar overall."