The research, which drew on hundreds of volunteers and was published in Science Advances, comes amid rising fears over the impact of widely available AI tools that turn simple text prompts into relatively sophisticated music, art and writing.

"Our goal was to study to what extent and how generative AI might help humans with creativity," co-author Anil Doshi of the University College London told AFP.

For their experiment, Doshi and co-author Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter recruited around 300 volunteers as "writers."

These were people who didn't write for a living, and their inherent creative ability was assessed by a standard psychology test that asked them to provide 10 drastically different words.

The scientists then split them randomly into three groups to write an eight-sentence story about one of three topics: an adventure on the open seas, an adventure in the jungle, or an adventure on another planet.

Participants were also randomly placed into three groups that received varying levels of AI assistance.

The first group got no help, the second was provided a three-sentence story idea from ChatGPT, and the third could receive up to five AI-generated story ideas to help them get going.

- Individual benefit, collective loss -

After completing their stories, participants were asked to assess their own work's creativity through measures including how novel it was, how enjoyable, and how much potential the idea had to be turned into a published book.

An additional 600 external human reviewers also judged the story on the same measures.

The authors found that, on average, AI boosted the quality of an individual writer's creativity by up to 10 percent, and the story's enjoyability by 22 percent, helping particularly with elements like structure and plot twists.

These effects were most significant for writers who were judged during the initial task to be the least creative, "so it has this kind of leveling the playing field effect," said Doshi.

But on the collective level, they found AI-assisted stories looked much more similar to each other than those produced without any AI help, as writers "anchored" themselves too heavily to the suggested ideas.

Hauser said this created a "social dilemma." On the one hand, "you make it easier for people to get in; lowering barriers is good." But if the collective novelty of art decreases, "it could be harmful down the line."

Doshi said the research also showed that, just like introducing pocket calculators to children too early could prevent them from learning how to do basic arithmetic, there was a danger that people could rely too much on AI tools before developing underlying skills in writing, music or more.

People need to start thinking about "where in my workflow can I insert this tool to get the most benefit, while still inserting my own voice into the project or outcome."