A week is, as the saying goes, a long time in politics. In technology, it is positively an aeon. Just last week, we were talking about the study of more than 14,000 self-published titles by Tuhin Chakrabarty that, while suggesting AI was generating commercial pressure on indie authors, found that sales of titles with signs of AI generation were lower than those of their human-authored counterparts.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This week has seen another study come to light with even more worrying conclusions. I will start, as I did last time, with the title. Because that tells us the hypothesis the researchers at Villanova University were really trying to test. And the title is, “Bot or Not: Can People Tell the Difference Between Stories Written by a Human or by an AI System?” Can you guess what the answer is?
There were two sets of studies. One took more than 1,600 readers and had them read a single short story, then guess whether it was human- or AI-written. The other two, with 900 readers, had them read two stories and then asked them to guess the origin of each.
The first result was the one you can guess. Humans were no better than random at telling the two apart. But that’s not what has been making the headlines. The really startling conclusion comes from a further piece of information participants were asked to provide: their assessment of their expertise in literature and in AI. Those who rated their AI expertise more highly, it turns out, were better than random at distinguishing the outputs. Those who rated their literary expertise more highly were not. This suggests that there are indeed perceptible differences, but those immersed in the world of creativity are not generally able to find them.
Take that with the ratings participants were asked to provide of the stories they read, and the picture may seem bleak. Without being able to discern which was which, participants gave higher ratings to the AI-generated stories. Much of the speculation as to why has revolved around the assumption that many readers prefer clarity and simplicity over complexity and nuance.
The upshot of all this? Well, the study’s authors suggest that there is nothing in these results to downplay the importance of creativity as a means of human expression and contemplation. The subtext may be that expression is decreasingly able also to be a commercial endeavor. The findings have prompted concern about what this could mean for human writers.
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