Who Owns Creativity and Who Does the Work? Trade-offs in LLM-Supported Research Ideation

TL;DR

This study explores how different levels of human control over LLM-based research agents influence scientific creativity, effort distribution, and ownership, emphasizing the importance of empowering researchers in AI-augmented research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agentic research ideation system with varying control levels and provides empirical insights into their impact on creativity, effort, and ownership in scientific work.

Findings

Perceived creativity support does not increase linearly with control.

Human effort shifts from ideation to verification.

Ownership of ideas becomes a negotiated outcome.

Abstract

LLM-based agents offer new potential to accelerate science and reshape research work. However, the quality of researcher contributions can vary significantly depending on human ability to steer agent behaviors. How can we best use these tools to augment scientific creativity without undermining aspects of contribution and ownership that drive research? To investigate this, we developed an agentic research ideation system integrating three roles -- Ideator, Writer, and Evaluator -- across three control levels -- Low, Medium, and Intensive. Our mixed-methods study with 54 researchers suggests three key findings in how LLM-based agents reshape scientific creativity: 1) perceived creativity support does not simply increase linearly with greater control; 2) human effort shifts from ideating to verifying ideas; and 3) ownership becomes a negotiated outcome between human and AI. Our findings suggest that LLM agent design should emphasize researcher empowerment, fostering a sense of ownership over strong ideas rather than reducing researchers to operating an automated AI-driven process.