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Cited by 50Innovative Human-Technology InteractionUsability and User Interface DesignDigital Media and Visual Art

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Writing with AI Lowers Psychological Ownership, but Longer Prompts Can Help

Open access
Joshi, Nikhita, Vogel, Daniel·2025·Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces

Abstract

The feeling of something belonging to someone is called "psychological ownership." A common assumption is that writing with generative AI lowers psychological ownership, but the extent to which this occurs and the role of prompt length are unclear. We report on two experiments to examine the relationship between psychological ownership and prompt length. Participants wrote short stories either completely by themselves or wrote prompts of varying lengths. Results show that when participants wrote longer prompts, they had higher levels of psychological ownership. Their comments suggest they thought more about their prompts, often adding more details about the plot. However, benefits plateaued when prompt length was 75-100% of the target story length. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we propose augmenting the prompt submission button so it must be held down a long time if the prompt is short. Results show that this technique is effective at increasing prompt length.

Overview

CoChat Summary

TL;DR

Writing with a generative AI assistant lowers psychological ownership compared with writing independently, but requiring or encouraging longer prompts can raise it. Across three experiments, psychological ownership increased with prompt length up to about a 150-word minimum, then plateaued, and a press-and-hold submission delay nudged users to write longer prompts.

Key findings

  • In Experiment 1, psychological ownership was lowest for the 3-word AI prompt condition (m = 1.80, sd = 1.13), then rose for 50–100 words (m = 3.90, sd = 1.61), 150–200 words (m = 4.57, sd = 1.70), and was highest for no-AI solo writing (m = 6.29, sd = 0.80).
  • Longer prompts were associated with higher psychological ownership: Word Count correlated with Psychological Ownership at r_s = .72, p < .001; Text Similarity at r_s = .75, p < .001; Mental Demand at r_s = .65, p < .001; and Effort at r_s = .66, p < .001.
  • Experiment 2 found a plateau beyond a 150-word minimum: ai-150 (m = 4.69, sd = 1.64), ai-175 (m = 4.70, sd = 1.73), and ai-200 (m = 4.54, sd = 1.81) did not differ significantly, and all AI conditions remained lower than no-AI (m = 6.19, sd = 0.99).
  • Experiment 3 showed that time delays increased prompt length: 20-sec (m = 76.91, sd = 68.13) and 60-sec (m = 74.57, sd = 63.80) produced significantly higher Final Word Count than none (m = 34.66, sd = 46.56) and 0-sec (m = 28.09, sd = 32.69), while the strict 150-word minimum condition had the highest Final Word Count (m = 164.65, sd = 19.54).

Methods

  • Experiment 1 used a within-subjects design with 31 valid Prolific participants after excluding 10 (24%). Participants wrote 150–200-word short stories either alone or with GPT-3.5 Turbo using prompts of 3 words, 50–100 words, or 150–200 words. Measures included a four-item Psychological Ownership composite (Cronbach’s α = 0.96), NASA-TLX items, logged Duration, Word Count, and Text Similarity via Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder; analysis used Friedman and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm’s corrections and Spearman correlations.
  • Experiment 2 used 34 valid participants after excluding 5 (13%), with the same protocol and measures (α = 0.92) but prompt conditions of 150–200, 175–200, and 200–250 words.
  • Experiment 3 used 156 valid participants after excluding 42 (21%) in a mixed design: condition was between-subjects (none n = 32, 0-sec n = 32, 20-sec n = 31, 60-sec n = 32, 150-word minimum n = 29) and trial was within-subjects (1–4). Participants wrote prompts to generate a 150–200-word story; delayed submission required holding the button, with delay proportional to prompt length. Logged measures included Final Word Count, Submission Attempts, Attempted Word Count, and Attempted Duration; analysis used Aligned Rank Transform, Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, Holm’s corrections, and Spearman correlations.

Limitations

  • The paper states that it explored prompt length within a single prompt, whereas real users likely refine generated text over multiple prompts; it calls for exploring word count across multiple messages in a conversation.
  • The paper states that the Experiment 2 plateau may be due to plateauing semantic text similarity and may disappear as models improve; the authors tested GPT-4 Turbo and 4-o with the same prompts and observed no differences in Text Similarity.
  • The paper states that Experiment 3 may lack ecological validity: no additional rewards were given for longer prompts, Prolific crowdworkers may be more conscientious and willing to write longer prompts or less likely to abandon the system, and 20- and 60-second delays may not transfer to real-world systems; shorter delays, feedback, and explanations may also affect willingness to wait.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3719160.3736608

Cites

50 of 50 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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0 Valid · 3 Not valid · 26 Not checked · 101 Own results and interpretations

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Ina Blau and Avner Caspi. 2009. Sharing and Collaborating with Google Docs: The Influence of Psychological Ownership, Responsibility, and Student’s Attitudes on Outcome Quality. In E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 3329–3335.
  2. Ina Blau and Avner Caspi. 2009. What Type of Collaboration Helps? Psychological Ownership, Perceived Learning and Outcome Quality of Collaboration using Google Docs. In Proceedings of the Chais Conference on Instructional Technologies Research, Vol. 12. 48–55.
  3. Mark D Dunlop, Emma Nicol, Andreas Komninos, Prima Dona, and Naveen Durga. 2016. Measuring Inviscid Text Entry using Image Description Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Workshop on Inviscid Text Entry and Beyond.
  4. Serge Egelman, David Molnar, Nicolas Christin, Alessandro Acquisti, Cormac Herley, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2010. Please Continue to Hold. In Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security.

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Metadata

Authors
Joshi, N., & Vogel, D.
Affiliations
University of Waterloo (CA)
Venue
Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Publisher
ACM
Published
2025-07-07
Pages
1-17
OpenAlex
W4412055679
Cited by
50
References
49
Citations by year
2026: 41 · 2025: 9
FWCI
30.93
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2024-03827)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design › Digital Media and Visual Art
Keywords
psychological ownership, prompt length, short story writing, user interface design, human-AI collaboration

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