AI 'help' for writers takes the novelty out of novels, research shows

Fiction writers who use artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots end up churning out narratives that are more alike than those penned by people, according to a team of UK-based academics.

Researchers at the University College London and University of Exeter found that when AI output was added to fiction, the outcome was stories that "decreased in novelty, overall" as these tales ended up "more similar to each other than stories by humans alone."

At the same time, using AI somehow "may be able to improve the creativity of individual writers" even if the end product echoes that of fellow would-be authors who lean on AI, the study's authors wrote.

The findings, which were published in the journal Science Advances, come as creative arts and news organisations grapple with the expanding use of so-called Generative AI.

While the Nikkei-owned Financial Times and OpenAI have announced a deal to train ChatGPT using the newspaper's old articles, several US newspapers are suing Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly "purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment," according to a complaint filed recently at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Hollywood writers last year went on strike, in part over worries about AI being used to churn scripts and screenplays.

"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," according to Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser, the researchers behind the Science Advances paper.

Around 900 people, one-third of them writers and the rest critics, took part in the tests.

The research echoes a previous response of Australian singer Nick Cave to AI-generated lyrics written in his dark balladic style. "ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience," Cave said in 2023. Songs arise out of suffering, the singer argued. "Data doesn't suffer."

It seems, however, that they jury is out on whether AI helps against or worsens writers' block. The UK researchers said that while "generated ideas from AI" can be used as a "springboard" for authors, they can at the same prove a millstone by weighing a writer with suggestions that "restrict the variability of a writer’s own ideas from the start, inhibiting the extent of creative writing."

But while the perceived "enjoyability" of AI-assisted stories was greater than those done by people, the overall impression, according to the researchers, was that using AI "ultimately decreased the collective creativity of all stories."

The Science Advances paper was published around a year after Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Washington researchers warned in sister journal Science that AI chatbots could "fundamentally transform" creativity.

More recently, a team of University of Southern California researchers found AI able to outdo humans when crafting jokes and headlines in the style of The Onion, a news satire publication.