Readers Prefer AI-Generated Stories Over Human-Written Ones, Study Finds
A new study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making reveals that readers often prefer AI-generated short stories over those written by humans. Researchers asked 1,682 adults to read one of six short stories, three written by humans and three produced by ChatGPT. Participants who read AI-generated stories rate them as more absorbing and of higher quality than the human-authored counterparts.
Interestingly, the findings also expose a bias in how readers perceive authorship. While participants generally prefer the actual AI-written stories in terms of quality and engagement, they give higher ratings to stories they are told come from human writers. Many participants also struggle to correctly identify whether a story is written by a human or AI when given misleading information about its origins.
Dr. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the study from Villanova University, notes that the simpler writing style of AI makes stories easier to digest. However, she emphasizes that this does not spell the end of human creativity. People write for self-expression and to make sense of their experiences, and she believes there is still plenty of room to appreciate the creative process behind human-authored literature alongside emerging AI-generated works.