LONDON: Creative work made with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) "appears to compromise myriad psychological boons typically associated with creativity”, a study has suggested.
The research from the UK's University of Essex indicated that, relative to their own human-only work, creators reported less authenticity with their AI-assisted work.
The authors of the study noted lower positive emotions and "modest but significant increases in the ‘existential ick’ emotions of disgust, guilt and shame”.
They added: "Revealingly, creators also rated their AI-assisted works as significantly less creative.”
The study, published online as a pre-print paper, involved more than 650 people across three experiments.
They examined differences in how people felt about creative work they had produced using AI compared with work they had created without it.
The results were based on self-reported feelings and involved participants from the UK and the US.
"Creativity has long been understood as an act of self-expression. But when we co-create with AI, something else is now contributing to the ideas, words or images that become the finished work," said PhD candidate Jessica Carson, who led the Department of Psychology study.
"Our findings suggest that this can weaken the feeling that a creation is really an expression of you and diminish some of the positive psychological outcomes typically associated with human creativity."
Participants believed their AI-assisted work contained less of their "love” – the passion and emotional attachment put into the creative process and product, according to the research.
"The love finding is particularly revealing,” said Ms Carson.
"It suggests that feelings of authenticity are bound up in the passion that we feel towards our creations – or more poetically, that it is in putting our love into what we create that we come to see ourselves more fully in it.”
She continued: "As AI plays more of a role in creative culture, it’s important to remind ourselves of what sets us apart as humans: we have a self from which to create.
"We have emotions and quirks, we face adversity and have a unique worldview.
"This lends our creative work an authenticity which AI can only mimic as artificiality.” – dpa
