Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of an AI Workflow

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Hauptverfasser: Long, Tao, Gero, Katy Ilonka, Chilton, Lydia B.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Long, Tao
Gero, Katy Ilonka
Chilton, Lydia B.
author_facet Long, Tao
Gero, Katy Ilonka
Chilton, Lydia B.
contents Generative AI brings novel and impressive abilities to help people in everyday tasks. There are many AI workflows that solve real and complex problems by chaining AI outputs together with human interaction. Although there is an undeniable lure of AI, it is uncertain how useful generative AI workflows are after the novelty wears off. Additionally, workflows built with generative AI have the potential to be easily customized to fit users' individual needs, but do users take advantage of this? We conducted a three-week longitudinal study with 12 users to understand the familiarization and customization of generative AI tools for science communication. Our study revealed that there exists a familiarization phase, during which users were exploring the novel capabilities of the workflow and discovering which aspects they found useful. After this phase, users understood the workflow and were able to anticipate the outputs. Surprisingly, after familiarization the perceived utility of the system was rated higher than before, indicating that the perceived utility of AI is not just a novelty effect. The increase in benefits mainly comes from end-users' ability to customize prompts, and thus potentially appropriate the system to their own needs. This points to a future where generative AI systems can allow us to design for appropriation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_09894
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of an AI Workflow
Long, Tao
Gero, Katy Ilonka
Chilton, Lydia B.
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Generative AI brings novel and impressive abilities to help people in everyday tasks. There are many AI workflows that solve real and complex problems by chaining AI outputs together with human interaction. Although there is an undeniable lure of AI, it is uncertain how useful generative AI workflows are after the novelty wears off. Additionally, workflows built with generative AI have the potential to be easily customized to fit users' individual needs, but do users take advantage of this? We conducted a three-week longitudinal study with 12 users to understand the familiarization and customization of generative AI tools for science communication. Our study revealed that there exists a familiarization phase, during which users were exploring the novel capabilities of the workflow and discovering which aspects they found useful. After this phase, users understood the workflow and were able to anticipate the outputs. Surprisingly, after familiarization the perceived utility of the system was rated higher than before, indicating that the perceived utility of AI is not just a novelty effect. The increase in benefits mainly comes from end-users' ability to customize prompts, and thus potentially appropriate the system to their own needs. This points to a future where generative AI systems can allow us to design for appropriation.
title Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of an AI Workflow
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09894