From Planning to Revision: How AI Writing Support at Different Stages Alters Ownership

2026-04-13

AI Summary

This study investigates how AI writing assistance may diminish authors’ sense of ownership over their texts, thereby affecting their feelings of attribution, perceived rights, normative awareness, and cognitive engagement. It presents the first systematic comparison of AI intervention during the planning, drafting, and revision stages, employing a randomized controlled experiment combined with textual analysis to quantify both AI contribution levels and their effects on ownership. Findings reveal that AI support during the planning phase has the least impact on ownership, whereas assistance during drafting exerts the strongest negative effect. Although greater AI-generated content correlates with higher text quality, it significantly reduces authors’ sense of ownership. These results highlight a fundamental tension between efficiency and authorial agency in AI-assisted writing, offering empirical grounding for the design and ethical governance of human-AI collaborative writing systems.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Although AI assistance can improve writing quality, it can also decrease feelings of ownership. Ownership in writing has important implications for attribution, rights, norms, and cognitive engagement, and designers of AI support systems may want to consider how system features may impact ownership. We investigate how the stage at which AI support for writing is provided (planning, drafting, or revising) changes ownership. In a study of short essay writing (between subjects, n = 253) we find that while any AI assistance decreased ownership, planning support only minimally decreased ownership, while drafting support saw the largest decrease. This variation maps onto the amount of text and ideas contributed by AI, where more text and ideas from AI decreased ownership. Notably, an AI-generated draft based on participants' own outline resulted in significantly more AI-contributed ideas than AI support for planning. At the same time, more AI contributions improved essay quality. We propose that writers, educators, and designers consider writing stage when introducing AI assistance.

Problem

• AI writing support
• ownership
• writing stages
• authorship
• human-AI collaboration

Innovation

• AI writing support
• sense of ownership
• writing stages
• human-AI collaboration
• authorship