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

[Submitted on 4 Jul 2025 (v1), last revised 12 Jul 2026 (this version, v3)]

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Writing longer prompts for an AI assistant to generate a 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.

Submission history

From: Nikhita Joshi [view email]
[v1] Fri, 4 Jul 2025 15:44:24 UTC (548 KB)
[v2] Fri, 3 Jul 2026 13:51:05 UTC (610 KB)
[v3] Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:04:41 UTC (610 KB)