Co-writing with AI: How Do People Interact with ChatGPT in a Writing Scenario?

Quickly after its release in 2022, the AI-based chatbot ChatGPT has gained worldwide attention and has been particularly recognized as a powerful tool for text composition due to its remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks, including text generation. Despite the growing use of ChatGPT and the recent debates associated with it, there is little research on the actual interaction of people with ChatGPT during writing. The exploratory study we present here addresses this research gap. In the setting of a collaborative-writing task, participants (N = 135) were instructed to engage with ChatGPT to compose a text discussing a prohibition of alcohol in public in relation to a given statement. To gain further insights on user behavior and experiences, we logged participants' screen activity during the writing task, applied questionnaires, and conducted an additional short interview with a randomly selected sub-sample. Results showed that most participants initially turned to ChatGPT for a draft of ideas. Additionally, participants mostly sent content-related prompts for data, facts, and information to ChatGPT. Mixed-methods analyses revealed that participants' affinity for technology interaction, current use of ChatGPT, and approach to the task were positively associated with the frequency of certain types of prompts. Our findings shed light on the dynamics of human-AI co-writing and contribute to a better understanding of how AI tools like ChatGPT can be integrated into the writing process.