Yet, a study has cautioned that the widespread adoption of AI in storytelling could lead to a homogenisation of future books and movies. The risk is that creative outputs may become monotonous and less diverse, and eventually start to feel the same.
To explore how generative AI might assist human creativity, researchers conducted an experiment involving around 300 volunteers as “writers”. These participants were not professional writers, and their innate creative potential was measured using a standard psychological test that required them to list 10 drastically different words.
The volunteers were then randomly divided into three groups, each tasked with writing an eight-sentence story on one of three themes: an ocean adventure, a jungle expedition or a journey to another planet.
Participants were also assigned to one of three groups with varying levels of AI assistance. The first group received no help, the second was given a three-sentence story prompt from ChatGPT, and the third group could access up to five AI-generated story ideas to inspire their writing.
After completing their stories, participants evaluated their own creativity based on novelty, enjoyment and the potential of the idea to be developed into a published book. Additionally, 600 external reviewers assessed the stories using the same criteria, providing an objective evaluation of the creative works.
After analysing the findings, the researchers discovered that on average, AI could enhance an individual writer's creativity by up to 10% and the story's enjoyability by 22%. It achieved this feat by improving elements like structure and plot twists.
These benefits were most pronounced for writers initially deemed the least creative, suggesting that AI helps level the playing field by boosting their creative output. But on a collective level, AI-assisted stories tended to resemble each other more closely than those created without AI. This was largely down to writers ‘anchoring’ their narratives too heavily to the AI-suggested ideas.
In essence, these findings indicate that while AI may help improve individual creativity, its use risks diminishing collective novelty.
According to study authors, this creates a social dilemma:
This also means that early adoption of as well as over-reliance on AI tools could hinder the development of fundamental skills in writing, music and other creative fields, similar to how early use of calculators might impede learning basic arithmetic.
The best way to counter this, as per researchers, is to identify where in the workflow AI tools can be utilised to gain the most benefit, all while ensuring the unique creative voice in the outcome is retained.
The findings were recently published in Science Advances and can be accessed here.