This article suggests that when people are lied to that stories were not written by AI (when they actually were), they prefer them.
It could still be quite some time before they're writing entire songs and books, though.
No one buys 1000 word stories, or listens to 12 second songs on Spotify, so for the time being it's not really any cause for concern.
If Facebook has demonstrated anything it's that people have preferred AI memes for a while already.
People "prefer" lower quality art all the time - look at what's big on the radio and in theaters, what's popular on TV, etc.
Why should I be concerned if AI is making trash art instead of humans?
I love Britney Spears when I was 9. Is the world really worse off if I'm listening to an AI version or Toxic or the Britney Original?
I can see why people would be scared if AI was pumping out Purple Rains and Superstitions on the regular, if it was writing a Secret History every hour, but it's not, nowhere even close.
This just seems like people being grumpy that people prefer Marvel movies over what they think are good movies.
Human artists have been pawning off derivative trash as art for a very very long time, and people have been consuming it and loving it. I'm not going to lose sleep if in 10 years AI is pumping out the derivative trash personalized to the exact level of trashiness desired by the consumer.
A huge limitation of the study IMO.
Most people who read are not reading 1000 word short stories. If they could replicate this story using novella length stories (25-40k words), I'd be curious to see the results. I would wager that a much larger % of people would prefer long form content from humans.
pair 1: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/yjahv
pair 2: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/sjph3
pair 3: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/4pfw3
(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)
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."
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.
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.
Then the value of many ancient texts must be close to zero, because we often know nothing about the people who wrote them. In many cases even our guesses for where and when they were written differ by multiple centuries or thousands of kilometers.
This is where imagination fills the gap and makes it interesting to think about.
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.
Most, but not all. For every 99 who give up and go and do something else, one transcends.
AI cannot create. Humans can. Most do not, but the possibility is always there that they could.
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.
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...
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.
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.
People care about the production process even if they can't tell you're lying to them about it.
roschdal•35m ago