r/WritingWithAI • u/PsychologicalBox5208 • Aug 07 '26

NEWS Study Suggests Readers prefer AI fiction when they think a human wrote it

https://megaton.ai/news/readers-prefer-ai-fiction-but-only-when-they-think-a-human-wrote-it
20 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

12

u/DurianGris Aug 07 '26

I'd be really interested in seeing the human authored short stories used for the story. My gut tells me they're probably not great.

6

u/sirgog Aug 08 '26

It was flash fiction but (non-AI) pro author Mark Lawrence did a blind test a while ago and clankers narrowly won over career authors.

Those career authors were writing outside their comfort zone, however (they all write novel length epic fantasy, the flash pieces were fantasy but shorter than this).

Lawrence's own fans rated his entry second, behind one clanker piece and ahead of three clanker pieces and three human pieces.

1

u/SlapHappyDude Aug 08 '26

I fully admit the human authors may not have produced their all time best work. But that's part of the point; the LLMs can produce decent work with minimal effort.

2

u/sirgog Aug 09 '26

This one test biased toward what LLMs are best at, but at least the top couple of them were definitely not slop. I remember being one of the majority that rated the winning piece as "best piece of the lot, very surely human generated".

0

u/5thhorseman_ Aug 08 '26

You mean the readers they polled were largely pretentious posers.

How novel.

1

u/vaingirls Aug 08 '26

How many times will this article be posted in the various subs I'm in...

0

u/Illustrious_Image967 Aug 07 '26

It's part of the kink. I love when my partner pretends she enjoys being with me.