Ernest Hemingway was in a bar with other writers when one of them proposed a $10 bet: to see who could write a story right there in just six words. Hemingway took a napkin and wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” (“For sale: baby shoes, never used”) and won the bet. Anil Doshi, professor of strategy at the University of London and Oliver Hauser, co-director of the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom), carried out a similar writing test in a study that shows that artificial intelligence (AI) helps improve individual creativity, but decreases the collective novelty of stories, generating stories that are more similar to each other. “If the publishing sector (and self-publishing) adopted more stories inspired by generative AI, our results suggest that the stories produced would be less unique as a whole and more similar to each other,” explain Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser, authors of the study published today in the journal Science Advances.
An AI tool like ChatGPT can impact creative writing in a number of ways. The ideas it generates can be used as a springboard for writing, as starting points that help the writer overcome the fear of the blank page. Less creative writers who used it increased their creative ability by 10% and their stories were more enjoyable. “They get ideas for development that they might not have been able to come up with on their own. Without that springboard, they might have a relatively disappointing starting point,” Hauser adds. However, artificial intelligence can also anchor the writer to a specific idea, taking the place of the writer’s own ideas.
Inspired by the Hemingway anecdote, the study’s authors asked 293 volunteers to write a story with eight sentences; some of them had to write it with only their own ideas, others could use ChatGPT to give them an initial idea, and the rest could receive up to five ideas from the OpenAI bot. The results of the study revealed that having access to ideas from generative AI makes a story more similar to the average of other stories. Those who did not use AI had a similarity score of 8.10 points, compared to those who used it with one or five ideas, with 10.7 and 8.9 points respectively. The writers who used generative AI did stick to the idea given to them by the chatbot, using the large GPT-4 language model.
Access to AI professionalizes stories beyond what writers could have achieved on their own. The less creative benefit. Professionals, such as researchers, politicians or workers interested in fostering creativity, are those who notice its effects the most. “Artists or writers may want to rethink the use of these tools for their writing, knowing that their output may be more similar to that of others who use the same tools; their output may be less unique,” explains Hauser. This is not the case for Patricio Pron, a writer who faced GPT-4 Turbo in a literary contest and won by a landslide, especially in the category of creativity and individual voice.
The use of AI can lead to a collective reduction in novelty and reduce creative breadth. José Antonio Alguacil, CEO of Ilusion Labs, explains why: “If all creatives turn to AI for ideas, we could end up unifying all content and lacking that unique spark that human experience and imperfection can bring. Genuine creativity comes from individual experiences, from those experiences that each person brings. Artificial intelligence tends to homogenize ideas and create repetitive patterns.”
For Teresa Mateo, a professor of didactics at the Complutense University of Madrid, the problem lies in the famous probability algorithm: “Although AI can store and process more data than human memory, its way of generating text is limited to the most probable answers. It does not reach the subtlety of human incoherence, which is characterized by wordplay and surprising evocations, both essential elements of creative genius that AI has not yet managed to fully replicate.”
Ethics and use of AI
The use of artificial intelligence in creative production is a source of serious concern. There are debates about whether it is ethical to use it, who owns it, and how authorship of the work should be shared, among other things. 58% of the study’s evaluators said that using AI was ethical and a “creative act,” while only 20% thought it was acceptable to do so without acknowledging its contribution. They did, however, impose a penalty on writers who used AI (compared to those who did not).
Can artificial intelligence replace the processes necessary to develop creativity? “Human beings can become frustrated and stop developing in a more general way due to the misuse of a technology that undermines a cognitive process,” explains Mateo. The key is to see artificial intelligence as a tool and not as a substitute: “As creatives, we have the responsibility to embrace this technology without losing sight of what makes us unique: our ability to connect emotionally, to tell stories that not only sell, but inspire and transform,” says Aguacil.
Experts point out the importance of maintaining the development of creativity as an essential cognitive process of human beings, without putting it on a silver platter for the machine. What happened to the baby in Hemingway’s story? Why were his unused shoes sold? His micro-story leaves room for countless stories, all of them different from each other.
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