Holding the Line: A Study of Writers' Attitudes on Co-creativity with AI

TL;DR

This study explores writers' attitudes towards AI co-creativity, revealing diverse preferences and boundaries, and provides insights for designing AI tools that respect writers' agency and comfort levels.

Contribution

It offers a qualitative analysis of writers' attitudes towards AI, mapping their openness across different writing stages and modes, which is novel in understanding co-creativity dynamics.

Findings

Most writers are interested in AI assistance to some extent.

Writers prefer to set firm boundaries with AI to maintain control.

Openness to AI varies across different stages and modes of writing.

Abstract

Generative AI has put many professional writers on the defensive; a major negotiation point of the recent Writers Guild of America's strike concerned use of AI. However, must AI threaten writers, their livelihoods or their creativity? And under what conditions, if any, might AI assistance be invited by different types of writers (from the amateur to the professional, from the screenwriter to the novelist)? To explore these questions, we conducted a qualitative study with 37 writers. We found that most writing occurs across five stages and within one of three modes; we additionally map openness to AI assistance to each intersecting stage-mode. We found that most writers were interested in AI assistance to some degree, but some writers felt drawing firm boundaries with an AI was key to their comfort using such systems. Designers can leverage these insights to build agency-respecting AI products for writers.