Study finds readers prefer AI-written stories

A new study has found that readers struggle to distinguish between stories written by humans and those created by artificial intelligence. In fact, they often rated AI-generated stories more highly while believing those stories had been written by human authors. Now the study, published by Cambridge University Press, was led by researchers at Villanova University in the US. It tested whether people aged between 18 and 81 could distinguish between short stories written by published authors and stories generated by chat GPT. Researchers found that most participants could not reliably tell the difference. In the first experiment, more than 1600 people read a story and were told it had been written either by a human or by AI, regardless of its true author. Participants gave the highest ratings to stories they believed were human-written, which were in fact created by AI. In two further experiments, participants were given one human-written story and one AI-generated story without being told which was which. Once again, most failed to identify the AI-written text. The researchers said AI-generated stories were often rated higher for their quality because they tended to be clearer, more direct and easier to read. By comparison, human-written stories were described as more subtle and more complex. The study also found that people with greater knowledge of AI were better at spotting AI-generated writing. However, those with stronger literary knowledge were no better than anyone else at telling the difference.