cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/27795833
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.
Depends on your definition of “satisfying”; and it’s entirely personal and subjective.
For me, a scifi book series like The Expanse is like popcorn; easy to read, lots of action and fun, and definitely worthwhile.
A more plot-driven series like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast is more dense, less action, and less straightforward.
They’re both masterpieces in my opinion, though totally different in tone, texture, and audience. You definitely can find “satisfying” reads in dense literature that takes more time to digest; it’s not a 1:1 ratio of “easy to breeze through = satisfying” to the exclusion of all other metrics. I mean, it might be for you, and that’s fine if so. But I promise you, even if that’s the case, someday you may fall head over heels in love with a book so dense it takes you ages to read, and each page will be a glorious and fantastic experience.
you are not wrong, though what i mean is that hard books take more energy to read. not necessarily that they are worse for it.
people who read one book per year are already on the top end of the bell curve. most people don’t read much or at all.
it can explain why something easy is more liked and i empathize not being a super avid reader myself.