  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 is uncertain how useful generative AI workflows
are after the novelty wears off. Additionally, workflows built with generative
AI have the potential to be easily customized to fit users' individual needs,
but do users take advantage of this? 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 there
exists a familiarization phase, during which users were exploring the novel
capabilities of the workflow and discovering which aspects they found useful.
After this phase, users understood the workflow and were able to anticipate the
outputs. Surprisingly, after familiarization the perceived utility of the
system was 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 potentially appropriate the
system to their own needs. This points to a future where generative AI systems
can allow us to design for appropriation.
