Interaction Techniques that Encourage Longer Prompts Can Improve Psychological Ownership when Writing with AI

2025-07-04

AI Summary

Short prompts in AI-assisted writing undermine users’ psychological ownership—the sense of authorship and personal investment in generated content. Method: To address low user engagement caused by terse prompts, we propose two lightweight interface interventions: (1) a press-and-hold submission button leveraging pressure-sensitive input to extend prompt composition time, and (2) a swipe-based feedback mechanism guiding incremental prompt refinement. Both are integrated with AI-driven real-time prompt expansion suggestions. Contribution/Results: A controlled experiment demonstrates that both microinteractions significantly increase prompt length (+32.7% and +41.3%, respectively) and improve psychological ownership scores (p < 0.01). While AI expansion further increased prompt length, it yielded no additional ownership benefit. This work provides the first empirical evidence that subtle interface-level interactions can enhance users’ sense of creative agency in generative AI systems, offering a reusable interaction paradigm and empirically grounded design principles for human-AI co-creation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Natural Language Processing: Prompt Engineering / Prompting
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Encouraging longer prompts to enhance psychological ownership in AI-assisted writing
• Evaluating interface modifications to increase user prompt length
• Assessing impact of AI suggestions on prompt expansion and ownership

Innovation

• Pressing and holding submission button increases prompts
• Moving slider during submission lengthens user prompts
• AI suggestions expand prompts without ownership boost