When it comes to literature, artificial intelligence is still no match for humans

Readers are more critical of texts they think have been written by an AI, US research reports. Image: Shutterstock

Authors are at the forefront of the debate on the uses of artificial intelligence. Text generators based on this technology are capable of producing compelling narratives that can rival those written by humans in quality. But that doesn't necessarily mean that people are keen to read them.

Researchers Hoaran Chu and Sixiao Liu conducted several experiments to find out how much people are interested in AI-generated works of fiction. They had several volunteers read two versions of the same story: one written by a human author, the other by ChatGPT. Participants were then asked to rate each of these stories according to their persuasive quality and their ability to transport the reader into the world of the narrative. "Transportation is a very familiar experience. It’s the feeling of being so engrossed in the narrative you don’t feel the sticky seats in the movie theater anymore," explains Hoaran Chu in a news release.

In a paper published in the Journal of Communication, the researchers explain that the volunteers found the stories generated by ChatGPT as compelling as those imagined by a human. But they didn't find them as captivating. To challenge the participants' assumptions, Hoaran Chu and Sixiao Liu switched how the stories were labeled, so that a story written by a human author was described as the work of ChatGPT, and vice versa. 

The findings show that readers are more critical of texts presented as being written by artificial intelligence, even if they actually aren't. "People don’t like when they think a story is written by AI, whether it was or not. AI is good at writing something that is consistent, logical and coherent. But it is still weaker at writing engaging stories than people are," says Hoaran Chu. 

This study suggests that people may to be resistant to the use of AI in literature. Perhaps they consider the art to be too human to be generated by a machine. That said, some writers are using this technology in their literary creation. Japanese author Rie Kudan has admitted to using ChatGPT to write 5% of her futuristic novel “Tokyo-to Dojo-to,” for which she won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. At the award ceremony, the novelist declared that artificial intelligence had enabled her to surpass her individual creative potential. In China, Shen Yang won second prize at a science fiction literary competition for “Land of Memories,” a short story written in three hours with the help of ChatGPT. Around 60 prompts were needed to achieve the resulting text. 

So can we really all become authors thanks to AI? Perhaps. As the use of generative artificial intelligence becomes easier all the time, it will no longer be necessary to master the fundamentals of writing to produce a more or less accomplished work of fiction. But it's unlikely that AI will produce a masterpiece capable of winning the favor of readers on a significant scale. "AI does not write like a master writer. That’s probably good news for people like Hollywood screenwriters—for now," concludes Hoaran Chu.