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

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's uncertain how useful generative AI workflows are after the novelty wears off. Additionally, tools built with generative AI have the potential to be personalized and adapted quickly and easily, but do users take advantage of the potential to customize? 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 the familiarization phase lasts for 4.3 sessions, where users explore the capabilities of the workflow and which aspects they find useful. After familiarization, the perceived utility of the system is 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 appropriate the system to their own needs. This points to a future where generative AI systems can allow us to design for appropriation.