Do people prefer stories written by AI?

fredley

Very bleak. I think like most people, I would prefer for stories not to be written by AI. I value human creativity, and believe that an LLM cannot truly produce art. This article suggests that when people are lied to that stories were not written by AI (when they actually were), they prefer them.

dumberquestions

It should be noted that these stories were 1000 word stories, with each one taking 5 minutes to read on average.

bananaflag

Rare exception of Betteridge's law of headlines

john_strinlai

stories below. they were generated with chatgpt 4.0. pair 1: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/yjahv pair 2: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/sjph3 pair 3: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/4pfw3

bluGill

What was the quality? AI generally will have better grammar and such vs what most people write. So I could believe you prefer the AI content in this example because it is better quality, but this tells us nothing about AI vs human written when someone takes the time to edit their rough drafts. (Note that hacker news discussions are not conductive to spending days crafting a good response - that takes days - so everything here is a rough draft)

afdl-1176

Of course AI is hyped at Villanova: https://www.villanova.edu/university/ai.html "Villanova embraces Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a commitment to thoughtful, ethical use rooted in our Augustinian Catholic mission and values. We aim to balance innovation with our humanist tradition and intellectual heritage, preparing students to lead responsibly in a changing world. Explore resources designed to help you learn, teach and work with AI at Villanova."

skeledrew

Funny. It's the same result as that famous painting labeled as AI-generated and people found many faults with it. It's just showing that people are biased against AI itself; the quality of the content doesn't really matter.

WarmWash

The real question to be debated is how do you deal with a new kid on the block, who is better than you at [whatever]. Denial seems to be the general human default, it's easy and free, but at best it can only delay the inevitable. Accept and adapt is probably the most logical approach, but that requires a lot of effort and risk taking, and still will likely leave you net worse off. I suppose hostility and violence is another human favorite, but that almost never has gone over well.

xpct

I don't think reading isolated stories holds much value. The value of the emotion it elicits is much lower than knowing the person who wrote it or in what historical or social background they did so. Reading stories written by humans is one of the ways we can keep ourselves grounded to other humans: be it through fantasy, lyrics, or autobiographies. I can only describe reading AI stories as emotional indulgence.

21asdffdsa12

Every story told, is folded into the corpus of all human stories, all variations of the heroes journey, all variations of the hammon-cycle. AI by being trained on the corpus, is average - which makes it better than 80 % of mankind. But we are tired of many stories. We see "new" movies until we are around 20 - then the repetition sets in- we get a refined taste and long for the exotic (-30) until finally, we search for outliers, for anything new, desperate under the sun. AI can not provide that. But also humans can not provide that. Every bard, every writer, every poet, every band rises every morning to compete against the beatles. Most of them loose and thus abandon the craft to win bread elsewhere.

oyakxd

In short: creating stories requires mental effort, and humans don't want mental effort, so use AI.

cautiouscat

I’m in both a lot of art based communities and programming based communities (like HN). The one blind spot many HN readers have is that the quality of something is one facet of an artwork. Humans make minute decisions in their art whether to tell a story or represent something. When someone generates something, at some point you as the viewer/reader could assume that arbitrary choices were made in places. Those arbitrary decisions just aren’t interesting. I’ve quoted this before, but Kane Parsons highlights exactly this thing: > If I see an element of the environment has been, you know they used generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, even if--. It just shuts the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details, 'cause I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they can make an arbitrary choice with literally anything. It’s just less interesting to our minds, I think because there’s less to ponder and explore. It can be a masterpiece in quality but when I know something in that piece was just made up by a machine, why would I care? I can’t wonder why the artist would include it. I can’t think about what it’s trying to tell me because it’s likely not telling me anything.

raincole

That's why those "we prefer human writing" polls (such as the one cited in [0]: whooping 98% readers say they prefer human writing to AI!) are just noise. To quote myself: > People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential dates, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better. [0]: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...

Dlemlo

Yeah why not? Srsly. Nonethless, a lot of people enjoy stupid movies, others enjoy smart movies etc. If you are not like me and you don't care about the time you spend on a 2h movie because you just want to watch something, you will have a complete different experience than me. I watched a 1000 movies and more, I want/I need something 'new' or unique i haven't seen a 1000 times. Its the same with the AI slop videos; I found the first 3 'cats with jobs ai' videos funny as a category, i don't want to watch thou 'accidents' videos if they are fake.

endymion-light

I'm sorry but all this proves is that a lot of published stories aren't very good. The three human stories attached don't have fantastic plot and read a little poorly. All three of the human written stories read like they were made for a reviewer/publisher rather than a reader. I don't think this is a good study or a good representation of good writing. I think many short stories have the issue of force feeding so much information and tricks that the 3 human stories read more gimmicky than the chatgpt ones.

pjc50

This is a bit like asking "do people prefer vegetarian meals if we don't tell them there's actually meat in it?" People care about the production process even if they can't tell you're lying to them about it.

mjburgess

It's quite likely that many survey participants were AI bots, and hence preferring AI generated content. And certaintly, that of the 1600+ people whose 15min they rented, few were paying any meaningful levels of attention to earn their 3 USD.