Inspo: Writing with Crowds Alongside AI

TL;DR

This study compares AI and crowd worker support in creative writing, finding that writers prefer AI for its speed and consistency, with implications for designing future writing assistance tools.

Contribution

It introduces Inspo, a novel text editor integrating AI and crowd support, and provides empirical insights into user preferences and interaction patterns.

Findings

Writers favored AI over crowd workers due to faster responses.

AI was perceived as more consistent in quality.

Crowd worker usage declined during the study.

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to support creative writing has bloomed in recent years. However, it is less well understood how AI compares to on-demand human support. We explored how writers interact with both AI and crowd worker writing assistants in creative writing. We replicated the interface of the prior crowd-writing system, Heteroglossia, and developed Inspo, a text editor allowing users to request suggestions from AI models and crowd workers. In a one-week deployment study involving eight creative writers, we examined how often participants selected crowd workers when fluent AI text generators were also available. Findings showed a consistent decline in crowd worker usage, with participants favoring AI due to its faster responses and more consistent quality. We conclude with suggestions for future systems, recommending designs that account for the unique strengths and weaknesses of human versus AI assistants, strategies to address automation bias, and sociocultural views of writing.