Interaction Techniques that Encourage Longer Prompts Can Improve Psychological Ownership when Writing with AI
This addresses the problem of user disengagement in AI-assisted writing for general users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing interface design principles.
The researchers tackled the problem of low psychological ownership when users write with AI assistants by developing interaction techniques that encourage longer prompts, finding that pressing/holding a submission button and moving a slider increased prompt length and psychological ownership compared to baseline, with a second experiment showing AI-generated suggestions further increased prompt length but not ownership.
Writing longer prompts for an AI assistant to generate a short story increases psychological ownership, a user's feeling that the writing belongs to them. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we evaluated two interaction techniques that modify the prompt entry interface of chat-based generative AI assistants: pressing and holding the prompt submission button, and continuously moving a slider up and down when submitting a short prompt. A within-subjects experiment investigated the effects of such techniques on prompt length and psychological ownership, and results showed that these techniques increased prompt length and led to higher psychological ownership than baseline techniques. A second experiment further augmented these techniques by showing AI-generated suggestions for how the prompts could be expanded. This further increased prompt length, but did not lead to improvements in psychological ownership. Our results show that simple interface modifications like these can elicit more writing from users and improve psychological ownership.