When ChatGPT is gone: Creativity reverts and homogeneity persists
Qinghan Liu Yiyong Zhou Jihao Huang Guiquan Li
ChatGPT has been evidenced to enhance human performance in creative tasks.
Yet, it is still unclear if this boosting effect sustains with and without
ChatGPT. In a pre-registered seven-day lab experiment and a follow-up survey
after 30 days of experiment completion, we examined the impacts of ChatGPT
presence and absence on sustained creativity using a text dataset of 3302
creative ideas and 427 creative solutions from 61 college students.
Participants in the treatment group used ChatGPT in creative tasks, while those
in the control group completed the tasks by themselves. The findings show that
although the boosting effect of ChatGPT was consistently observed over a
five-day creative journey, human creative performance reverted to baseline when
ChatGPT was down on the 7th and the 30th day. More critically, the use of
ChatGPT in creative tasks resulted in increasingly homogenized contents, and
this homogenization effect persisted even when ChatGPT was absence. These
findings pose a challenge to the prevailing argument that ChatGPT can enhance
human creativity. In fact, generative AI like ChatGPT lends to human with a
temporary rise in creative performance but boxes human creative capability in
the long run, highlighting the imperative for cautious generative AI
integration in creative endeavors.