CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study from Oregon State University indicates that artificial intelligence can significantly enhance creativity in student writing, but only when instructors provide guidance about how to incorporate it into the creative process.
Researchers in the university’s College of Liberal Arts found that when students receive instruction on how to use AI, there is a significant increase in creativity over both their original writing and their AI use without instruction.
“This approach has huge implications, not just for writing classes, but for any discipline where critical or creative thinking matters,” said co-author Wayne Harrison, a senior instructor in the School of Writing, Literature & Film. “We don’t have to choose between banning AI entirely and throwing up our hands in defeat.”
The study, funded by the OSU Ecampus Research Unit, examined writing from 31 students in two introductory online creative writing courses. Each student completed the same fiction exercises under three conditions: without AI assistance, with ChatGPT but no guidance, and with both ChatGPT and instructor support. Independent experts then judged the samples for creativity.
“The little research that has emerged in this area hasn’t wanted to put AI and humans in a horse race on creativity,” said lead author J.T. Bushnell, also a senior instructor in the School of Writing, Literature & Film. “We didn’t have those reservations. We’re writers and teachers ourselves. We wanted to know the outcome. But we also wanted to see what happened if we moved from competition to collaboration.”
Among the key findings:
- Unsupported AI use resulted in a “flattening” effect, boosting creativity for lower-performing students while diminishing it for highly creative students.
- When instructor guidance was provided, overall creativity increased significantly, with the greatest improvements among students who initially scored lowest in creativity.
- Students reported lowest satisfaction when using AI without instruction, despite potential creativity improvements.
“It took us less than 20 minutes of instruction to change the way students interacted with the technology,” Bushnell noted. “And what they got out of it, too.”
The instruction came from three video lessons, he said. The first described the creative process, then identified the two phases ChatGPT could assist with: finding opportunities and brainstorming.
The other two lessons modeled AI use at these phases, showing the ChatGPT interface while the instructor narrated his experience using it.
The experts who judged creativity in the student writing samples were seasoned instructors of college-level creative writing with advanced degrees in fiction writing and numerous publications. After first rating each sample’s creativity on their own, they convened to discuss their assessments and reach a consensus.
“This technique, developed by Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile in 1982, is standard in creativity research,” Bushnell said.
The Research Fellows Program in OSU’s Ecampus Research Unit supported the study.
College of Liberal Arts
About the OSU College of Liberal Arts: The College of Liberal Arts encompasses seven distinct schools, as well as several interdisciplinary initiatives, that focus on humanities, social sciences, and fine and performing arts. Curriculum developed by the college’s nationally and internationally-renowned faculty prepares students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully, contributing to a student's academic foundation and helping to build real-world skills for a 21st century career and a purposeful life.
J.T. Bushnell, 541-221-0624
[email protected]
Wayne Harrison, 541-514-4258
