ChatGPT is taking the world by storm. Even creative tasks like writing stories suddenly seem easier with a little help from artificial intelligence. But what does that mean for your own creativity? Does it really improve, or does it just feel like you have to put in less effort? Recent research provides a surprisingly clear answer to that question.
A new study by Mei et al that I found via Carl Hendrick looked at how using ChatGPT affects students when writing a creative assignment. Over 200 students were divided into groups and each had to come up with original ideas for a futuristic printer that could print literally anything within ten minutes. Half were allowed to use ChatGPT while the other half had to do it all by themselves.
What turned out? ChatGPT did indeed make the students more creative. Students for whom English was not their native language saw their performance improve significantly. They not only came up with more ideas but also with more original and diverse concepts. In addition, they made fewer spelling mistakes and finished faster.
But there is a downside to this: students enjoyed the creative process less and found writing less valuable. The task felt easier but, therefore, less challenging and fun. They trusted the result less and doubted its ethical side. Only when participants openly admitted that they had used ChatGPT did the acceptance of artificial intelligence increase again.
This raises important questions: What do we actually want with creativity in education? Should we strive for pure performance, or is the experience of wrestling with your own ideas important? According to the researchers, schools should teach students how to use artificial intelligence consciously and critically so that it remains a tool and does not replace their own creative thinking.
In short, ChatGPT can certainly enhance your creativity, but to enjoy it and continue to feel your value, you need to know how to use it wisely.
Abstract of the study :
As generative AI (GenAI) becomes more sophisticated, it is increasingly being used as a tool to enhance creative expression and innovation. Along with its potential benefits, it is imperative that we examine pitfalls in how generative AI may affect the quality of creative thinking and possibly lead to a narrowing of diversity both in representation and thought. In this study, we employed an experimental design with 225 university students who completed a creative writing task with pre- and post-task surveys to assess ChatGPT’s impact on their performance and experiences compared to a control group who did not use ChatGPT. Results show that using ChatGPT enhanced creativity of output and reduced the difficulty and effort required for the task, particularly for nonnative English speakers. However, it also diminished the value and enjoyment of the task and raised moral concerns. We contribute to the nascent literature on GenAI by showing how ChatGPT assistance could potentially bolster human creativity by facilitating content delivery or providing useful counterpoint ideas. We also significantly advance scholarship on understanding experience of GenAI, demonstrating that bypassing the cognitive effort required for creativity by using ChatGPT could be harmful to the creative process and experience of creative tasks, especially when steps are not taken to address the use of AI in a transparent manner. Finally, our novel mixed-method study design offers a contribution to the methodological frameworks for the study of the effects and experience of GenAI. We discuss the study results in relation to implications for educational practices and social policy and argue that our results support recommending an integration of generative AI into higher education alongside practices that help to mitigate the negative impacts of AI use on student experience.