Research shows AI can boost creativity for some, but at a cost

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Researchers found that AI could increase the creativity of individual writers, but it also led to many similar stories. / Getty Images

Can an AI chatbot make a person more creative?

Supporters of artificial intelligence say it can serve as a muse, but critics doubt it — they say that it does little more than remix existing work.

Now, new research suggests that elements of both arguments are right. AI might be able to help a person become more creative, but it risks decreasing creativity in society overall.

'New' ideas

Questions have swirled around the use of AI in art since large language models (also known as LLMs) burst on the scene almost two years ago. Companies such as OpenAI have touted their products as tools that artists could use to increase their output. While some writers say they’ve embraced AI as a tool in their creative process, many other artists and creators have expressed skepticism. Some have even sued, alleging that the tools use copyrighted work for training purposes.

Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try and answer the basic question of whether AI could increase creativity.

“It does have a sort of incredible ability to sort of come up with content at the click of a button,” he says. On the other hand, AI can often produce stories that are similar in nature.

“It could be that it’s not as creative as you might think, and it doesn’t help you be more creative,” he says.

To try and get some hard data on this squishy question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people, who Doshi says did not identify as professional writers. “We asked them to write a short, eight-sentence story,” he says.

Around one-third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. Those that got help were divided into two subgroups: one that got a single AI-generated idea, and one that got to choose from up to five.

Crucially, Doshi says, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves.

“Our intention was to focus on whether AI can help human creativity,” Doshi says. “This was not a horse race between AI versus humans.”

The results were judged by a group of 600 evaluators. They were asked to grade each story on its “novelty” and “usefulness.” Novelty was a proxy for the story’s originality, while usefulness was a measure of whether the story was high enough quality to be published.

The results, published today in the journal Science Advances, found that stories written with AI help were deemed both more novel and useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea did better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest boost — they wrote stories seen as around 8% more novel than humans on their own, and 9% more useful. 

What’s more, Doshi says, the worst writers benefited the most.

“Those that were the least inherently creative, experienced the largest improvement in their creativity,” he says.

So AI really does appear to make people more creative. But there’s a plot twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect.

“Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had AI,” Hauser says.

The social dilemma

In other words, the chatbot made each individual more creative, but it made the group that had AI help less creative.

Hauser describes the divergent result as a “classic social dilemma” — a situation where people benefit individually, but the group suffers.

“We do worry that, at large scale, if many people are using this… overall the diversity and creativity in the population will go down,” he says

Annalee Newitz, a science fiction author and journalist, questions the findings. Trying to quantify whether a person is more creative is tricky: “I think that part of creativity is that it can’t really be measured in percentages like that,” Newitz says.

Nevertheless, when Newitz tried reproducing some of the AI story ideas themselves using the paper’s methods, they clearly saw how using AI would generate similar stories.

For example, when asked to produce story ideas for an “adventure on the open seas,” they found AI would often incorporate the clichéd idea of finding treasure into the story. And it seemed to latch onto the phrase “the real treasure was…” — which is a common internet meme. Because AI is trained on a huge number of texts, Newitz says, it seems reasonable that it would draw from those frequently-used clichés first.

Newitz also says the social dilemma warned about in the study has already hit the sci-fi community. Last year the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld had to close online submissions because “they were flooded with AI-written stories.”

In the end, Newitz says that they wouldn’t blame anyone who wanted to try using AI to write a story. But ultimately, they think these tools miss the point of writing.

Creative writing is “humans communicating with other humans,” Newitz says. “Even if something is badly written — even if it’s not very creative — if it’s written by a human, then it’s fulfilling its purpose.”