Experiments show: moderate your AI use when writing and creating — not too much, not too little
- How much AI should you actually use for creative work? A study from the University of British Columbia gives a concrete answer: there's a sweet spot — use too little or too much, and creativity scores drop either way.
- The main experiment recruited about 150 people to brainstorm a startup idea for a student with just $10 in seed money, split into three groups: one ChatGPT prompt, four to six prompts, or at least nine. Expert judges scored the ideas on novelty, practicality, and commercial value — the middle group scored highest on average. Repeating the experiment with 319 people produced the same result.
- Professional creatives show the same curve: fashion designers, visual artists, writers, animators, tech workers, and influencers filled out a 1-to-7 questionnaire, and their managers separately rated their creative performance — the people who self-rated 4 to 5 performed best.
- Huang's hypothesis is that AI supplies a perspective outside your own experience, the same reason teams tend to be more creative than individuals. The author adds a few caveats: large language models are fundamentally statistical tools that often produce an "average answer," and they can also erode your own sense of competence.
- The columnist who wrote this piece tried it himself, going back and forth with ChatGPT to build a plot more intricate than he could have written alone. But he says the process cost him the joy of synapses straining to find new connections, and he ultimately decided to write it himself.
He had ChatGPT draft a movie plot
Mischa's parents are throwing her engagement party at the family's country estate. As she gives her toast, the glass slips from her hand, and inside the stem is something hidden: a micro memory card. The find unravels a corruption scandal buried for decades, one that implicates her own family and forces her to choose between justice and loyalty.
No screenwriter wrote that. New Scientist columnist David Robson gave ChatGPT a creative-writing prompt, a single line: "Her face froze, eyes widening, as she watched the glass shatter on the floor." His goal was to sketch out a short plot outline in thirty minutes.
He wasn't angling for a career in Hollywood. He was testing a study's findings.
Why it's worth reading: three rounds within the same study, a roughly 150-person experiment, a 319-person replication, and a survey of professional creatives, all produced the same inverted-U result: moderate users performed best. The first two rounds were scored by human expert judges on novelty, practicality, and commercial value; the third measured creative performance through each participant's own manager.