A new study published in the U.S. magazine Science Advances recently said that the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) may make it easier to create film, television, literature, music, etc., but if the creative industry relies too much on AI to "write stories", there may be a sense of monotony and similarity in works in the future.
Generative AI can transform simple text prompts into relatively complex music, text, images, and videos, but it remains unknown what impact the widespread use of such tools will have on human creation. In order to understand the impact of generative AI on short story creation, researchers from institutions such as University College London recruited nearly 300 volunteers as "writers" to conduct an online study.
The volunteers were not professional writers who made a living from writing. The researchers assessed their innate creativity and then randomly divided them into three groups. All volunteers were asked to write an 8-sentence short story based on one of the three randomly assigned topics: high seas adventure, jungle adventure, and alien adventure.
The three groups of volunteers received different degrees of generative AI-assisted creation. The first group did not receive any AI assistance; the other two groups could choose to use AI to obtain an initial idea of 3 sentences; among the two groups that were allowed to create with the help of AI, one group of volunteers could choose to obtain up to 5 AI-generated ideas. After the creation was completed, the volunteers were asked to self-evaluate their stories based on criteria such as novelty and emotional characteristics. In addition, 600 external reviewers evaluated these stories with the same criteria.
The study showed that receiving generative AI assistance helped create more creative and interesting stories, which was particularly evident in volunteers who were initially determined to be inherently lacking in creativity. For example, for volunteers who were inherently lacking in creativity, receiving five AI-provided ideas increased the novelty of their stories by 10.7% and the funniness of their stories by 22%. But overall, the stories created by the AI-assisted group looked more similar than those created by the group without any AI assistance, because they relied too much on the story ideas provided by AI when creating.
The researchers said this is equivalent to creating a "social dilemma": generative AI makes it easier for people to enter the field of writing, and "lowering the threshold is a good thing." But if the overall level of artistic innovation decreases, it will be harmful. This study shows that people must start thinking about how to use AI in their work to get the most benefits while retaining their own thinking.