Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete

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.

      • monsieur_hackerman@programming.dev
        11·
        1 day ago

        Nice try fbi.

        But the implication that a chatbot is needed to knock rich fucks down a peg is silly to me. Orcas didn’t need Claude to attack yachts, the ocean didn’t need Gemini to crush that dipshit and his sub, saint Luigi didn’t need grok when he was being a referee for my child’s soccer game

        If a token predictor has removed your creative spark, then you’ve already lost. That’s unfortunate, but assuming everyone else has lost would make you wrong.

      • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        What’s yours? Pay Anthropic $2k/mo to generate fake C&D letters and send them out to random businesses?

        Unless you have a plan that doesn’t rely on the service-based models, then I don’t see where you’re going with this. Sure, you can use self-hosted models, assuming you’re fine paying for the GPUs (Jensen Huang? Lisa Su? Lip-Bu Tan if you’re feeling special?) and power to run them of course. But you’ll be “behind” the big cloud-based models, endlessly chasing after them.

        Or, hear me out, don’t use them and do it all yourself and you won’t have to pay these companies and make their execs richer.