Link: AI makes writing easier, but stories sound alike, study says

**Books and movies of the future could all start to feel the same if creative industries embrace artificial intelligence to help write stories, a study published on Friday warned.** The research, which drew on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid rising fears over the impact of widely available AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art, and writing.

"Our goal was to study to what extent and how generative AI might help humans with creativity," co-author Anil Doshi of the University College London said. For their experiment, Doshi and co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers as "writers."

These were people who didn't write for a living, and their inherent creative ability was assessed by a standard psychology test that asked them to provide 10 drastically different words. The scientists then split them randomly into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three topics: an adventure on the open seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet.

Participants were also randomly placed into three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance. The first group got no help, the second was provided a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them get going.

After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work's creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book. An additional 600 external human reviewers also judged the story on the same measures.

On average, AI boosted the quality of an individual writer's creativity by up to 10%, and the story's enjoyability by 22%, helping particularly with elements like structure and plot twists. But on the collective level, they found AI-assisted stories looked much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI help, as writers "anchored" themselves too heavily to the suggested ideas. #

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