Who Owns the Text? Design Patterns for Preserving Authorship in AI-Assisted Writing
This addresses the issue of preserving authorship for writers using AI tools, presenting incremental improvements through design patterns.
The study tackled the problem of AI writing assistants weakening writers' sense of authorship by testing design choices like persona coaching and style personalization in an online experiment with 176 participants. It found that AI assistance reduced psychological ownership by about 0.85-1.0 points on a 7-point scale, with style personalization partially restoring ownership by about +0.43 points and increasing AI incorporation by 5 percentage points.
AI writing assistants can reduce effort and improve fluency, but they may also weaken writers' sense of authorship. We study this tension with an ownership-aware co-writing editor that offers on-demand, sentence-level suggestions and tests two common design choices: persona-based coaching and style personalization. In an online study (N=176), participants completed three professional writing tasks: an email without AI help, a proposal with generic AI suggestions, and a cover letter with persona-based coaching, while half received suggestions tailored to a brief sample of their prior writing. Across the two AI-assisted tasks, psychological ownership dropped relative to unassisted writing (about 0.85-1.0 points on a 7-point scale), even as cognitive load decreased (about 0.9 points) and quality ratings stayed broadly similar overall. Persona coaching did not prevent the ownership decline. Style personalization partially restored ownership (about +0.43) and increased AI incorporation in text (+5 percentage points). We distill five design patterns: on-demand initiation, micro-suggestions, voice anchoring, audience scaffolds, and point-of-decision provenance, to guide authorship-preserving writing tools.