Interaction Techniques that Encourage Longer Prompts Can Improve Psychological Ownership when Writing with AI

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that simple interface modifications encouraging longer prompts can enhance psychological ownership in AI-assisted writing, with potential implications for user engagement and content personalization.

Contribution

The paper introduces and evaluates two novel interaction techniques that effectively increase prompt length and psychological ownership in AI writing tools.

Findings

Interaction techniques increased prompt length and psychological ownership.

Adding AI-generated suggestions further increased prompt length but not ownership.

Simple interface changes can significantly impact user engagement.

Abstract

Writing longer prompts for an AI assistant to generate a short story increases psychological ownership, a user's feeling that the writing belongs to them. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we evaluated two interaction techniques that modify the prompt entry interface of chat-based generative AI assistants: pressing and holding the prompt submission button, and continuously moving a slider up and down when submitting a short prompt. A within-subjects experiment investigated the effects of such techniques on prompt length and psychological ownership, and results showed that these techniques increased prompt length and led to higher psychological ownership than baseline techniques. A second experiment further augmented these techniques by showing AI-generated suggestions for how the prompts could be expanded. This further increased prompt length, but did not lead to improvements in psychological ownership. Our results show that simple interface modifications like these can elicit more writing from users and improve psychological ownership.