Are Writers Losing the Creativity Battle To AI?

Kurt Vonnegut plays chess against a robot. AI generated PicLumen. 

The creative path is full of failure, external criticism, mental challenges, and embarrassment. You put a spotlight on your weaknesses and fail publicly to grow. That struggle is what makes creative endeavors so admirable. Yet, with ChatGPT, maybe it’s not necessary.

Researchers recently tested 300 non-writers to see if AI boosted human creativity in a micro-fiction test. One-third of the participants could use one AI prompt, one-third could use five AI prompts, and one-third had nothing but their organic pink brains.

Judges decided that the five-prompt group wrote the most creative, publishable stories, followed by the one-prompt group. The human-only group performed the worst. 

If your reaction to these results is anger, you’re not alone. AI is the Ozempic of creativity. It feels like cheating. The uphill battle, failures, and consistent effort that make artistic endeavors commendable become obsolete if you cannot tell the difference between human and machine-made stories and the robot’s version is better.

Already writers can't compete with generative AI's quickness. That's like having a foot race against a quarter horse. We can't compete with its productivity. That's like having a plowing competition against a Clydesdale. Now we beating-heart human beings are less creative than machines? 

Luckily,  AI-generated "creativity"  has an Achilles heel where imaginative types still maintain a valuable edge. At least for now.

AI’s Creativity Weakness

The first bit of good news is AI did not significantly benefit inherently imaginative people in the creative writing study.

Researchers tested participants' creativity prior to the writing test by making them list a series of unrelated words. E.g., spaceship, El Chapo, pinecone, etc. The more divergent the words, the more creative the person.

Results showed AI benefited the least imaginative, dull writers the most; their “creativity” rose to the same level as the most creative types. However, highly creative people outperformed or equaled the five-prompt group on every measure: novelty, usefulness, writing quality, enjoyableness, and absence of boringness. (In some cases, one prompt slightly improved naturally creative types.)

That means the Kafkas and Kurt Vonneguts of the world don’t have to worry about being outdone by ChatGPT just yet, even though the creative landscape got much more competitive.

The second caveat is, though AI helped individuals become more "creative," there was less diversity overall among the AI-assisted groups. The AI-prompted stories used familiar tropes and had similar sentence structures. The researchers assume this is because AI is trained on vast amounts of written content, so it makes sense it would pull from the most common themes. 

At the moment, novelty in creativity remains an advantage for the human race, but we may be losing ground. 

The Risk of Over-Relying on Generative AI

Weakening Creative Muscles 

Time and time again, history has shown us that technology atrophies our own abilities. Remembering phone numbers and navigating city streets are now unnecessary, just like other once fundamental skills like basic mental math. 

People say AI should be used as an assistant, not a replacement. However, over-reliance is imminent. Think about when you had to write papers in school. It was likely an arduous experience you put off until the last minute, and added useless conjunctions to hit your word count. 

Of course we will use AI to offload the cognitive burden of writing. We use technology to relieve challenges that are far less daunting, like heating up food in a microwave versus the stove. 

However, eliminating the need to write comes at a serious cost. Writing is complex thinking. The process forces us to structure our ideas and form logical arguments. Sitting down to write allows the necessary space for creativity to surface. We can get a flash of insight, but oftentimes creativity is a process of trial and error. It takes time. It takes making mistakes. Writing gives us the chance to focus and experiment.

Losing our ability to write and think creatively seems higher stakes than getting from Point A to Point B without a phone or knowing the babysitter’s phone number by heart. Writing is a mental skill that seems particularly valuable because it can help us solve problems, develop new ideas, and understand our own thoughts. Eliminating the need to write is a step backward toward illiteracy. And when we lose our writing skills, we inevitably lose our thinking and creativity skills. 

Kroger-Branding Written Content 

That brings up another problem. Scrawny writing and creativity muscles mean we will lean into AI even more. There will be fewer typos, but there will also be far less diversity since AI reduces overall creativity. 

Right now, when you look online, you already see a plethora of regurgitated man-made content. Most YouTube thumbnails, for instance, all show a close-up of someone's face looking like a high school drama student. Everyone is doing the same thing to game algorithms, get subscribers, and make money. But now, AI can regurgitate an infinite amount of homogeneous content and rapid speed until, suddenly, everything online exists at the most generic level. 

Lack of novelty will continue to spiral because AI likes to get high on its own supply—it uses the same unoriginal content it generates to spawn more content. Variety will continue to deteriorate as AI continually reproduces more sameness from its own synthetic data. 

This cycle will be hard to escape when we no longer use our own creativity.

Making the Case for the Hard Road

Difficulty is valuable. Exercise, which is physically painful, leads to vitality. Eating a good diet, which is not always easy, results in good health. Challenges in life make us more resilient, smarter, and empathetic.

On the other hand, speed has a destructive quality. Quality suffers when we are in a rush. Taking a pill to solve health problems comes with harmful side effects and doesn't present long-term solutions. We usually learn nothing at all if we cram for tests. We can get any product we've ever dreamed of at the click of a button, but that ease has not made our lives measurably better. It's definitely produced a lot more waste. 

Research shows we are getting dumber. The causes are not entirely clear, but scientists think the environment, diet, the amount of media we consume, and a decline in reading all contribute to the problem. I think it’s a safe bet to say a decline in writing will make us dumber-er.  

I’m not opposed to efficiency. I am not opposed to using AI to support writing tasks. I am opposed to AI replacing writing.

Right now we still have the advantage of novelty. But if we lean too heavily into AI, that advantage is gone. That means we have to resist using AI as a substitute for our minds when writing. We sometimes have to sit and think a little bit harder about what we want to say before asking ChatGPT to say it for us. It’s not fun, but it’s healthy. 

I realize this reality could have a shelf life as long as a discounted banana. AI is evolving quickly. It's possible that AI might soon outperform the most creative people out there. Developers might come up with a solution to AI’s novelty problem. But for now, there's still variety. We still have to work to create. If we choose the hard road, we still have the creative upper hand.

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