"It was 80% me, 20% AI": Seeking Authenticity in Co-Writing with Large Language Models

TL;DR

While writers reacted positively to personalized AI writing tools, they believed the form of personalization needs to target writers' growth and go beyond the phase of text production, and readers' responses showed less concern about human-AI co-writing.

Abstract

Given the rising proliferation and diversity of AI writing assistance tools, especially those powered by large language models (LLMs), both writers and readers may have concerns about the impact of these tools on the authenticity of writing work. We examine whether and how writers want to preserve their authentic voice when co-writing with AI tools and whether personalization of AI writing support could help achieve this goal. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 professional writers, during which they co-wrote with both personalized and non-personalized AI writing-support tools. We supplemented writers' perspectives with opinions from 30 avid readers about the written work co-produced with AI collected through an online survey. Our findings illuminate conceptions of authenticity in human-AI co-creation, which focus more on the process and experience of constructing creators' authentic selves. While writers reacted positively to personalized AI writing tools, they believed the form of personalization needs to target writers' growth and go beyond the phase of text production. Overall, readers' responses showed less concern about human-AI co-writing. Readers could not distinguish AI-assisted work, personalized or not, from writers' solo-written work and showed positive attitudes toward writers experimenting with new technology for creative writing.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Study procedure for Part 1 (interview study with writers) and Part 2 (survey study with readers).
• Figure 2: Interface of the CoAuthor system (image adopted from Mina_Lee_CoAuthor), which contains a text editor where users can request (Tab key) and adopt AI (Enter key) suggestions through keyboard shortcuts.
• Figure 3: Reader participants' ratings to compare the three pieces of writing. Left: Ratings for whether a piece of writing is likely to be done independently by a human writer (rating = 5) or co-written with AI (rating = 1) on a 5-point Likert scale. Right: Ratings for whether a piece of AI-assisted writing preserves a writer's authentic voice.
• Figure 4: Reader participants' ratings for writing passages for each writer. Left: Ratings for whether a piece of writing is likely to be done independently by a human writer (rating = 5) or co-written with AI (rating = 1) on a 5-point Likert scale. Right: Ratings for whether a piece of AI-assisted writing preserves a writer's authentic voice.
• Figure 5: Readers' perceptions toward human-AI co-writing before reading AI-assisted writing. Dashed lines represent mean values.