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.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    What strikes me about the present moment is that it feels like particularly bad timing.

    I’m not so sure that technological developments follow a well defined path and like to think about what alternative timelines would look like, especially with humanity being better prepared for them.

    For instance, I’ve figured for a long time that the internet was a few decades earlier than it should have been for our social and political development. Probably TV too.

    AI just feels 100s of years too early. Like we’re only just getting to grips with post-capitalism and climate change as ideas let alone problems we can solve.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      I think this is actually advantageous to us in a way, because clearly AI is something of a system shock to many people right now, whereas in a hundred years it may have not been nearly as apparent as the danger it is (and I don’t mean LLMs, I mean AI in general, especially for surveillance and weapons).

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yea I hear. We’ll see I guess.

        Personally, I’m seeing much more falling in line instincts than anything else and fear that any “shock” and reaction is confined to bubbles without any solid culture and infrastructure to break out into any sort of effective movement.

        • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
          3·
          2 days ago

          Luckily, revolutions have never required the majority of a populace to actively participate in to succeed, just a majority going “meh, sure”.

          But yes, I am personally also very worried that we’re reaching a point with technology that state surveillance and violence will both be too easily applied and too pervasive for the revolution to overcome.

    • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Quite agree, but there is the other POV that “AI” has emerged just at the right time to distract us from doing anything about climate change and rampant late stage capitalism… That is of course the perspective of capitalist entities that really need to wrench another few decades of profit out of us before we die in sundry environmental disasters.

      See also, “why it would be really convenient if we could upload our minds to a metaverse while the world burns and billionaires escape to Mars”.