GoKawiilYou probably think you prefer writing created by a human. But a new study is proving that you may not actually. You may just like things that sound human.
Led by Cambridge University Press and researchers at Villanova University, the study asked its 1,682 participants aged 18 to 81 to read a few fictional stories to determine whether they could tell if they were AI-generated, and then asked them to rate the quality of each story.
The study consisted of three separate experiments. In part one, all participants were given a story – some told it was AI-generated, others told it was human-written – and then rated its quality and engagement. In the second and third experiments, the participants were divided into two groups: one with 424 participants and the other with 481. Each person was given one human-written and one ChatGPT-generated story, though it was not disclosed which was which, and they were asked to identify which story they believed was authored by ChatGPT.
They found that the participants rated stories generated by ChatGPT highest, especially when they were intentionally and incorrectly told the story had been written by a human. Researchers also found that many (over 60% in experiment two and over 48% in experiment three) couldn’t correctly identify which content was AI-generated.
Deena Weisberg, senior author of the study and professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Villanova University, said this shows a bias toward “narratives written by real people.”
“We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI’s capabilities,” she said. “I’d say that public assumptions about AI’s capabilities are increasingly out of date.”
Why do people actually prefer AI writing?
There is a growing portfolio of evidence that people like AI-generated writing, including short stories, essays and poetry.
A 2023 study led by Renee Richardson Gosline of MIT found similar results, concluding that AI-generated content and augmented AI (the AI made the final decision with human output as a reference) were seen as higher quality than that produced by human experts and augmented human experts (the human makes the final decision with AI output as a reference).
Weisberg speculates that this is likely due to AI-written stories being more direct, explicit and simple, whereas human-written stories tend to be more subtle or complex and leave room for interpretation.
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