Do people prefer stories written by AI?

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.

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.

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.

Here's a scoop from inside writing circles (pre-AI era): we were a lot into "good writing techniques". Not into communication. We wanted to produce a "marketable product". On the way, we (writers, literature professors, critics, etc) trained readers and writers to appreciate technique by telling them there was such a thing. We established tropes, because "This enemies-to-lovers story is good" sells more than "you should read Book". AI is very good at techniques and tropes. If readers want authentic human writing, they will have to change.

"We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI's capabilities."

It's not about the relative "creativity" of it. Art is fundamentally about communication. It's a social activity, whether you're reading a book or listening to music or looking at a painting. Even a mid-average author is going to make something more compelling, on a human level, than extraordinary prose generated by a machine.

AI-generated creative artifacts are as interesting as the fractals in a snowflake. Interesting, sometimes beautiful, but void of human meaning.

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.

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

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)

Here are the stories, sadly, they immediately reveal the source so you can't play the quiz really. On the other hand, I think most people would spot the classics like em-dash and metaphores straight away. https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/osfstorage

This sounds as of AI has wider appeal. Like those bland mass-market beers that nobody likes very much but nobody hates either. Restaurants have those on the menu as a second choice.

While a real, published, author has taste and appeals to some people, not to everyone. Journal editors make sure of that.

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.

These are ~1000-word stories (prompts at [1]), squarely in the sweet spot where planning logistics are minimal, context windows comfortably fit everything, and the appropriate level of abstraction omits any details which could glaringly reveal weak world-model knowledge.

SOTA LLMs from 2 years ago would saturate this study, and while modern LLMs are amazing and I suspect they would do quite well on a similar but more challenging study that forces them out of said comfort zone, this isn't that.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...

No, I have 0 interest in AI stories or music or art. I like all of these things because it's a view into the mind of the artist and I want to connect with another human and appreciate what they made and why.

I feel like this is just "we lied to people and we are surprised they trusted us" which just emphasize how hard we should work to enforce generated content as such (which I don't even know if it is possible in a reliable way)

Anyway, the good thing with human mind is it can explore, where a LLM is statistically producing words. It will certainly produce average stories, which if they are short will be better than most human writing. But it won't explore new ways of writing, which are the ones which can become a masterpiece IMHO

I would be interested in long stories experiments though, is the context wide enough to keep consistency and mid quality or are they becoming boring and un-readable like claude can be when trying to explain a concept ?

Then starts the philosophical questions : If a human need to write world rules, names, locations, characters, psychology, how each character perceive the world despite its rules, define relationship between characters and then delegate the story writing to a LLM, how much of the story belong to the human and what's the difference between doing this and hiring a ghostwriter

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

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

TDR: no.

LLM writing is optimized, at a great expense, for that specific parameter. They literally have human raters fine-tuning "favorability" - general appeal - as a part of post-training. So yes, the conclusion here doesn't surprise me at all. By the way, this is also true of HN! You think you're better than that, but at this point, on any given day, we have around 10 LLM-generated stories on the front page (and another 10 are usually AI-related press releases or op-eds).

Anyway, human writing isn't like that. You have a style that some people will like, some people will find "meh", and some people will hate.

A better question is, do people want to read AI text all day? And the answer to that question is, I think, very different. Most people don't. Which is why so many parties are really determined not to tell you.

No. Dear lord no.

One thing I am getting really tired of is the growing inability to distinguish legitimate sources. I don’t want to have to play, “can you tell the difference?” It’s not fun being had by a liar.

I want human written content or nothing at all. I care about the struggle. I like the spelling and grammar mistakes. I enjoy the story between the lines. I like the growth of the author and watching them and their work evolve.

Generated fiction is boring because it has none of that. There is no life in it. No author.

“A human wrote it,” is a light trick. Ok, who? Where are they from? If you have to lie to give answers in order to convince someone they like the story you’re not proving that people prefer AI stories in my estimation: you’re proving that the test is a convincing lie. And maybe that people are gullible.

I'll save you the time and effort. No.

Stories are always based on realities experienced by the authors, either personally, or viscerally. AI has no experience of this kind.

The experiences then are assembled or re-assembled into an art form, that makes impact on the thinking reader. The key ingredient is how this experience was meaningful, useful, or otherwise impactful enough to have qualified to become art.

Thus, reading fiction (good ones, not the rubbish kind) lets us experience those moments without the actual life-level cost (the only cost is reading). And therefore, these experiences get transferred to us, making us wiser, more aware, more rational-- if the art is real art.

Take the experience-as-art out of the equation and all is left is just slop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's pseudoscience no matter what, but I'd like to see the results sliced up for an age range of roughly 35-70. I would heavily question the taste and judgment of those outside that range. Or at the very least note that people's personalities will change significantly when entering/exiting that range.

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...

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.

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."

Rare exception of Betteridge's law of headlines

No

Reading this, I'm reminded of... New Coke.

Despite post facto conspiracy theories that it was a guerilla marketing campaign to promote "Old Coke", it was not. Coca-Cola tested a new formula in focus groups and people preferred it at the time because, basically, it was sweeter. But this didn't translate into longer term consumption. It's a cautionary tale in how data science can fail and how you shouldn't necessarily extrapolate to the long-term from the short-term.

So when people say they preferred AI written stories, what are they really reacting to? There's probably a lot of elements that are engaging but is it a lasting story? Most enduring stories become so because they speak to some truth of the current times or the human condition that can be hard to separate from the technical merits of the story.

Example #1: Fight Club both as a book and a movie was a bit of a sleeper hit. It was a box office failure. But it became a cult classic because it was one of the earlier works that spoke to the loss of a future for men in our society.

Example #2: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Again, it was a sleeper hit but it built over time as a relatively early Western expression of queer culture, gender identity and cultural conformance.

Example #3: The Wire. While it had great writing it has endured as a testament to institutional failure at every level and that doesn't necessarily take a villain. Everybody can be acting in their own interests and you end up with inevitable failure anyway.

Example #4: The Great Gatsby. This was never a hit in F. Scott Fizgerald's lifetime. How it became one is an interesting story. Basically, during WW2 the Army created these small print books for deployed soldiers to easily carry and read. Then once the war ended and many of the veterans went to college, they wrote about the Great Gatasby. It's now viewed as an American masterpiece that captures the 1920s like few other works. It expresses class consciousness and some of the metaphors (like the green light on the dock) are debated to this day.

Now, could AI write things that coherently speak to the human condition this way? Not yet (IMHO). Far from it.

That being said, there are only so many base story structures. Take the romance category. You'll find repeated tropes. Could AI write what might best be called "pulp fiction" in that genre? Probably sooner rather than later.

No