Doshi & Hauser (2024) published a striking finding in Science Advances: while generative AI helps individual writers produce more creative stories, it simultaneously reduces the collective diversity of content across all writers.
In an experiment with hundreds of writers producing over 10,000 short stories:
- AI-assisted stories were rated higher in creativity by human evaluators
- Writers with access to AI ideas showed greater individual improvement, especially weaker writers
- But the similarity between stories increased — the collective output became more homogeneous
- This "diversity collapse" was most pronounced when all writers used the same AI
The Monoculture Risk
This finding reveals a fundamental tension: AI can make each person more creative, but if everyone uses the same AI, the culture itself becomes less diverse. It's the creative equivalent of biodiversity loss — individually optimized, collectively impoverished.
Source
Doshi, A. R., & Hauser, O. P. (2024). Science Advances, 10(28), eadn5290.