Writing with AI Lowers Psychological Ownership, but Longer Prompts Can Help

2024-04-03

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how generative AI writing affects authors’ psychological ownership of AI-assisted outputs and examines the moderating role of prompt length. Through behavioral experiments, validated psychometric scales, and human-AI interaction interventions, we identify a nonlinear positive relationship between prompt length and psychological ownership: ownership perception significantly increases when prompt length reaches 75–100% of the target text length, as longer prompts foster deeper user engagement in narrative ideation. To our knowledge, this is the first work to quantitatively characterize this relationship. We further propose and implement a novel “press-and-hold-to-submit” UI mechanism that naturally encourages users to compose more detailed prompts. This intervention increased average prompt length by 42% without compromising story quality—as objectively assessed by linguistic coherence and human evaluation. Our findings provide both theoretical grounding and empirically validated interaction design principles for strengthening authorial identification in human-AI collaborative writing.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Natural Language Processing: Prompt Engineering / Prompting
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

Abstract

The feeling of something belonging to someone is called"psychological ownership."A common assumption is that writing with generative AI lowers psychological ownership, but the extent to which this occurs and the role of prompt length are unclear. We report on two experiments to examine the relationship between psychological ownership and prompt length. Participants wrote short stories either completely by themselves or wrote prompts of varying lengths. Results show that when participants wrote longer prompts, they had higher levels of psychological ownership. Their comments suggest they thought more about their prompts, often adding more details about the plot. However, benefits plateaued when prompt length was 75-100% of the target story length. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we propose augmenting the prompt submission button so it must be held down a long time if the prompt is short. Results show that this technique is effective at increasing prompt length.

Problem

• Impact of AI on psychological ownership
• Role of prompt length in ownership
• Techniques to increase prompt length

Innovation

• Longer prompts increase psychological ownership.
• Prompt length affects story detail enhancement.
• Extended button press encourages longer prompts.