aceGenerative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content
Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (AI)-including powerful large language models (LLMs)-holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on generative AI ideas. We study the causal impact of generative AI ideas on the production of short stories in an online experiment where some writers obtained story ideas from an LLM. We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, an…
Writers who received LLM-generated story ideas produced short stories that were rated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, with the largest improvement for less creative writers.
Writers who used LLM-generated story ideas produced short stories that were more similar to each other, reducing collective diversity and producing a narrower scope of novel content.
Results are from an online experiment on short story production using LLM story ideas, so may not generalize to other creative domains or real-world writing workflows.
Evidence
- Peer-reviewedScience Advances2024-07-12
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Truvace Impact Record TRV-2026-0386, v1: “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content.” Truvace, 2026-07-20. /record/TRV-2026-0386 (accessed at citation time). sha256 e2b61b6ee6c2ef85…
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