AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds
Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete From Homer’s Odyssey to Agatha Christie’s crime fiction, humans have produced plenty of tales to grace the bookshelf. But research suggests artificial intelligence may now be providing some competition. In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making , 1,682…
A recent study has found that AI-generated short stories were rated as more absorbing and of higher quality than those written by humans. The research, published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, involved 1,682 adults who read one of six short stories, three of which were authored by humans and three by the AI program ChatGPT.
Participants were told which stories were human-written and which were AI-generated, though the information was not always accurate. Despite this, participants rated the AI-generated stories as more engaging and of higher quality than the human-written ones. However, participants who were told the stories were human-authored gave higher ratings to those stories.
Dr. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University, stated that AI systems can already generate short stories that are at least as good as human-written ones, suggesting that our views of AI's abilities should be updated. However, Weisberg noted that human-authored novels are likely to differ from AI-generated ones.
The researchers also conducted two additional experiments, with 905 adults given two of the six short stories on the same theme, only one of which was human-written. The participants guessed which story was written by a human and which by AI, with about 40% guessing correctly in one experiment and 52% in another. AI writing has a distinct style that can be learned to recognize with practice, according to Dr. Weisberg.
The preference for human-written stories may be due to the desire for authenticity, but people actually prefer AI-generated stories because they are easier to read and digest. Luke Kennard, a professor of film and creative writing at the University of Birmingham, emphasized that AI is highly contentious, noting that it is based on a massive database of stolen human writing and is trained on vast amounts of physical datacenter resources with negative consequences for surrounding communities.
Written by urgent.news from Guardian Technology's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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