Incentives Shape How Humans Co-Create with Generative AI

Abstract

Generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of people's everyday workflows. Early evidence has shown that while generative AI can increase individual-level productivity, it does so at the cost of collective diversity, potentially narrowing the set of ideas and perspectives produced. Our research stands in contrast to this concern: through two pre-registered randomized control trials, we show that incentives can moderate AI's homogenizing force in two creative writing tasks where participants can use AI interactively. Participants rewarded for originality relative to peers produce collectively more diverse writing than those rewarded for quality alone. These participants continued to engage with AI, but ultimately incorporated less AI-generated text verbatim. Our results reveal that the effects of generative AI depend not only on the technology itself, but also the behavioral strategies and incentive structures surrounding its use. We release a rich, anonymized dataset capturing fine-grained trajectories of human-AI co-creation across both studies.