• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 14, 2024

Journalists who are nervous about the impact of generative AI on their jobs may now have reason to feel even more unsettled. 

A new academic study claims to show that AI bolsters creativity, and that the worst writers benefit the most. 

“We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers,” the authors write in Science Advances.

However, “generative AI–enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone,” they add. “These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.”

The study was conducted by Oliver Hauser, of the University of Exeter and Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management.

The researchers asked 293 non-professional writers to write an eight-sentence story. The results were judged by 600 evaluators on Prolific, based on novelty, usefulness and human characteristics. They conducted 3519 evaluations.

“We find that, while having access to one generative AI idea leads to somewhat greater creativity, the most gains (and statistically significant differences in our preregistered indices) come from writers who have access to five generative AI ideas.”

Writers who had access to one AI idea fared better than those with none, but individuals with access to five AI ideas did better yet. They wrote stories that were 8% more novel and 9% more useful. And the worst writers did considerably better than they would have without AI, NPR reports in an analysis. 

That is hardly comforting. It’s one thing if amateur writers use AI to post things in social media. It’s another if hedge funds that own newspapers, say, hire them because they’re cheaper than newsroom professionals who learned their craft the hard way and can write without crutches.