Can artificial intelligence boost creativity? Yes — but at a price : NPR

Can AI chatbots enhance human creativity?

Proponents of AI say it can act as a muse, but critics are skeptical, saying AI can do little more than remix existing work.

Now, new research suggests that elements of both arguments are correct: AI may help make people more creative, but it also risks making them less creative across society.

New Ideas

Questions have been swirling around the use of AI in art ever since large-scale language models (also known as LLMs) emerged about two years ago. Companies such as OpenAI have promoted their products as tools that artists can use to increase their artistic productivity. Some artists have Adopting AI as a tool in the creative processHowever, many other artists and creatives have expressed skepticism. There have been lawsuitsThese tools claim to use copyrighted works for training purposes.

Oliver Hauser, an economist who studies artificial intelligence at the University of Exeter in the UK, sought to answer a fundamental question: can AI enhance creativity?

“There’s an incredible ability to generate content at the click of a button,” he says. But AI also often produces similar stories in nature.

“It may not be as creative as you think it is, and it may not help you to be more creative,” he says.

To get hard data on the murky subject of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi of the London School of Management. They recruited about 300 people who weren’t professional writers. “We asked them to write a short story, eight sentences long,” Hauser says.

About a third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while the rest were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. The assisted writers were split into two subgroups: one received one AI-generated idea and the other had to choose from up to five.

Importantly, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write their own stories, Doshi says.

“Our goal was to focus on whether AI can support human creativity,” Doshi says. “This wasn’t an AI vs. human competition.”

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

result, Released today In the journal Scientific progress, They found that stories written with the help of AI were deemed more novel and useful: Writers who had access to one AI idea performed better, but those who had access to five ideas improved the most, producing stories that were deemed about 8% more novel and 9% more useful than stories written by humans alone.

Moreover, Doshi says, the worst writers have benefited the most.

“The least creative people experienced the greatest improvements in creativity,” he says.

So it seems that AI does indeed make people more creative. But there’s a twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect.

“Overall, there was less diversity in novelty in the AI ​​group,” Hauser said.

Social Dilemma

In other words, the chatbot increased each individual’s creativity, but the AI-assisted group’s creativity decreased.

Hauser describes these conflicting results as a “classic social dilemma” — a situation in which the individual benefits but the group suffers.

“I worry that if too many people use it on a large scale, it will reduce the diversity and creativity of the population overall,” he says.

Annalee Newitz, Science fiction writer, journalistBut researchers question the findings. It’s hard to quantify whether someone is more creative. “I think there’s a part of creativity that’s not really measured in percentages like that,” Newitz says.

Still, when Newitz tried to recreate some of the ideas in the AI ​​stories using the methods in the paper, it became clear that using AI could produce similar stories.

For example, when asked to come up with story ideas for “high seas adventures,” the AI ​​was found to often incorporate the cliché idea of ​​a treasure hunt into its stories, and seemed to fixate on the phrase “The real treasure is…” Common internet memesBecause AI is trained on vast amounts of text, it makes sense to start by learning from commonly used clichés, Newitz says.

Newitz also said the social dilemmas warned about in the study are already hitting science fiction. Last year, the science fiction magazine Clark’s World wrote We had to close online submissions. This is because “there was an influx of articles written by AI.”

Ultimately, Newitz says he doesn’t blame people for trying to use AI to write stories, but ultimately, they think these tools miss the point of what writing is all about.

Creative writing is “human communication,” Newitz says. “Even if the writing is poor or not very creative, as long as it’s written by a human being, it serves its purpose.”