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The rise of generative AI instruments like ChatGPT has sparked debate about their impression on creativity and the creation of novel concepts.
A brand new research by researchers from the College of Faculty London Faculty of Administration and the College of Exeter explores the impact of generative fashions on artistic writing. The research examined how entry to story concepts generated by giant language fashions (LLMs) affected the creativity of brief tales written by people.
The outcomes are nuanced. Whereas generative AI led to tales that had been rated as extra artistic, partaking and higher written, it additionally resulted in tales that had been extra comparable to one another.
Measuring the impression of generative AI on artistic writing
The research centered on brief story writing. The members had been requested to put in writing a brief, eight-sentence story a couple of randomly assigned topic.
The researchers measured creativity primarily based on novelty and usefulness.
Novelty measures “the extent to which an idea departs from the status quo or expectations.” Then again, usefulness is “the practicality and relevance of an idea.” For brief tales, usefulness would possibly translate to the story changing into “a publishable product, such as a book, if developed further.”
The researchers hypothesized that generative AI can have an effect on artistic writing in two methods. On the one hand, it could be used as a “springboard for the human mind, providing potential starting points that can result in a ‘tree structure’ of different storylines” or assist writers overcome author’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.
Then again, generative AI could anchor the author to a selected thought 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.
To research the impression of generative AI on these elements of creativity, the researchers designed a two-phase on-line experiment. Within the first part, 293 members had been requested to put in writing a brief story a couple of random subject. The members had been divided into three teams:
Human-only: This group obtained no help or enter from generative AI.
Human with one gen AI thought: This group may obtain a three-sentence story thought generated by OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Human with 5 gen AI concepts: This group may request as much as 5 concepts from GPT-4.
The writers then self-evaluated their tales primarily based on novelty, usefulness and varied emotional elements. Within the second part, 600 evaluators assessed the tales on the identical standards with out understanding which group the writers belonged to.
Generative AI enhances creativity
The research discovered that entry to generative AI concepts improved each novelty and usefulness.
“We find that having access to generative AI causally increases the average novelty and usefulness… relative to human writers on their own,” the researchers write.
Apparently, the group with entry to 5 AI-generated concepts confirmed probably the most important enchancment. Entry to extra concepts permits writers to interrupt away from their preliminary assumptions and discover a wider vary of prospects.
The research additionally discovered that writers who scored decrease on baseline creativity evaluation benefited extra from generative AI. These writers confirmed important enchancment of their tales’ novelty and usefulness after they used AI-generated concepts. The researchers observe that on this case, generative AI acts as an equalizer that removes “any disadvantage or advantage based on the writers’ inherent creativity.”
Accordingly, evaluators discovered the AI-assisted tales to be extra pleasing, higher written and extra more likely to have plot twists.
“Having access to generative AI ‘professionalizes’ the stories beyond what writers might have otherwise accomplished alone,” the researchers write.
Particular person creativity versus collective novelty
Whereas generative AI enhances particular person creativity, the researchers additionally discovered that tales primarily based on AI-generated concepts had been extra comparable to one another in comparison with these written by the management group.
This discovering raises considerations in regards to the potential homogenization of artistic content material if generative AI turns into broadly adopted.
“In short, writers in the two generative AI conditions are anchored to some extent on the generative AI idea presented to them,” the researchers write.
If writers rely too closely on comparable units of prompts and concepts from a restricted variety of generative AI fashions, “there is risk of losing collective novelty,” the researchers warn.
“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,” they write. “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 findings could be important as extra firms are providing AI-powered writing instruments and a few organizations are utilizing LLMs to create content material en-masse. And the long-term impression will probably be when the online turns into stuffed with content material which have comparable distributions, which can in flip be used to coach the subsequent era of language fashions.
