Which Contributions Deserve Credit? Perceptions of Attribution in Human-AI Co-Creation
This addresses the problem of fair attribution in human-AI collaboration for knowledge workers, with incremental insights into perception differences.
The study investigated how knowledge workers attribute credit to AI versus human partners in co-creative writing tasks, finding that AI consistently receives less credit for equivalent contributions and that disclosure of AI involvement is important to participants.
AI systems powered by large language models can act as capable assistants for writing and editing. In these tasks, the AI system acts as a co-creative partner, making novel contributions to an artifact-under-creation alongside its human partner(s). One question that arises in these scenarios is the extent to which AI should be credited for its contributions. We examined knowledge workers' views of attribution through a survey study (N=155) and found that they assigned different levels of credit across different contribution types, amounts, and initiative. Compared to a human partner, we observed a consistent pattern in which AI was assigned less credit for equivalent contributions. Participants felt that disclosing AI involvement was important and used a variety of criteria to make attribution judgments, including the quality of contributions, personal values, and technology considerations. Our results motivate and inform new approaches for crediting AI contributions to co-created work.