Research Shows AI Fosters Individual Creativity, But Not in Larger Groups

A new experiment conducted by researchers at the University College London and University of Exeter found that AI can potentially help foster creativity for some individuals; however, it dampens creativity when looked at as part of a larger group.

The experiment, which was published in Science Advances this week,  specifically focused on people writing short stories. Hundreds of people wrote short stories roughly eight sentences in length. One group wrote independently, while the other could use GPT-4 for a story idea, along with a few sentences. One final group could get up to five story starters.

After the groups were done writing, an independent group rated the stories based on novelty, enjoyment, and whether or not they thought they might be publish-worthy. Researchers also tested participants’ creativity in a word-production task commonly used in academia beforehand.

In the end, the people with lower creativity scored the weakest on their finished stories; however, they saw the most significant gains when they used AI to help them. The more options those people were given, the higher their ultimate score.

On the other hand, however, people who already scored higher on the creativity metric didn’t see any benefit to AI’s help, and in some cases, those writers even scored lower.

Researchers also discovered that the AI-assisted stories, while better overall, were also similar to each other.

“While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is risk of losing collective novelty,” the researchers said. “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.” 

The research suggests that while AI could be helpful for creative pursuits, if it’s adopted in a widespread way it ultimately will end up creating simialr things.