Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

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

Morteza Behrooz, Yuandong Tian, William Ngan, Yael Yungster, Justin Wong, David Zax

TL;DR

The paper investigates how writers perceive and engage with AI as a co-creative partner in story generation, arguing for collaboration rather than automation. It employs a qualitative study with 37 writers to map writing work into five stages and three modes, revealing how openness to AI depends on stage-mode combinations. Key findings show high AI openness in Story Management and Feedback, but substantial resistance in Artiste mode due to concerns about agency and perceived loss of craft, underscoring the need for boundary-aware, explainable AI tools. The work provides design guidance for agency-preserving AI interactions and highlights the importance of customizable collaboration boundaries to align AI support with human creative processes.

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.

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

TL;DR

The paper investigates how writers perceive and engage with AI as a co-creative partner in story generation, arguing for collaboration rather than automation. It employs a qualitative study with 37 writers to map writing work into five stages and three modes, revealing how openness to AI depends on stage-mode combinations. Key findings show high AI openness in Story Management and Feedback, but substantial resistance in Artiste mode due to concerns about agency and perceived loss of craft, underscoring the need for boundary-aware, explainable AI tools. The work provides design guidance for agency-preserving AI interactions and highlights the importance of customizable collaboration boundaries to align AI support with human creative processes.

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.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 2 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 11 sections, 2 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and Background
  2. A Qualitative Study on Writers
  3. Participants, Protocol and Procedure
  4. Study Findings
  5. Writing stages have to be explicitly recognized
  6. Writing modes have to be recognized to effectively engage in co-creativity
  7. Modes and stages can help predict a writer's degree of openness to AI co-creativity
  8. Design Challenges Presented by the Stage-Mode Framework
  9. The Need for Effective Communication of Boundaries with the AI
  10. Conclusions, Limitations and Future Work
  11. Appendix

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: A selection of the various design illustrations used in our study, as stimuli, to help cause the formation of new ideas and provoking thoughts of writers. This set did not intend to lay out or imply a full interface, user journey, or exhaustive set of features.
  • Figure :