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 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.
The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.
Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.
Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said: “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as – if not better than – human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”
However, Weisberg, who is herself a creative writer, said that did not mean writing should be left to AI, noting that novels produced by tech were probably going to be different from those written by humans.
“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.
“Humans write as a form of creative self-expression or to challenge ourselves, or to make sense of our experiences. The fact that AI can generate human-like stories doesn’t change any of that.”
The results also suggest attitudes to AI matter: participants with more positive attitudes toward AI gave higher ratings to stories they were told were produced by ChatGPT than those with a less positive outlook.
The researchers carried out two further experiments in which 905 adults were given two of the six short stories – both on the same theme and only one of which was penned by a person. They were then asked to guess which was written by a human and which by AI.
In one experiment, about 40% guessed correctly, a result that is worse than chance, while in the other experiment 52% guessed correctly.
“There is no general evidence that participants were able to distinguish human-written from AI-generated stories,” the authors write.
The researchers found that while participants’ self-reported expertise with fiction was not linked to how accurately they guessed, greater expertise with AI systems was.
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