Writing with AI Lowers Psychological Ownership, but Longer Prompts Can Help
<|reference_start|>Writing with AI Lowers Psychological Ownership, but Longer Prompts Can Help: Feelings 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 is 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, enforced through word limits. 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. However, benefits plateaued when prompt length was 75-100% of the target story length. To work in current interfaces, we propose creating a "soft constraint" in the interface to nudge behaviour. Results show that a submit button that must be held down a long time if the prompt is short is effective at increasing prompt length.<|reference_end|>
@article{joshi2024writing,
    title={Writing with AI Lowers Psychological Ownership, but Longer Prompts Can
  Help},
    author={Nikhita Joshi and Daniel Vogel},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.03108},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.03108},
    primaryClass={cs.HC}
}