Live data from Hacker News

Do people prefer stories written by AI?

cambridge.org

21–30 of 82 posts

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#21

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

If it's not already the case, it likely will soon be that people prefer short main motifs for songs generated by AI over humans. 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 preferre…

[deleted]

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#22

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,…

What does that have to do with the results I'd the study? Do you think there will be a different result if it was done by anyone else, anywhere else?

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#24

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 fo…

> 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.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#25
post #16

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#26

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

Honestly much more curious to know about the human written stories were here! Feels at least pretty important to the study. With the AI, the specifics feel less important, because the relative input is going to be so small, so the researchers can probably just do it themselves. But how do you choose which works to stand in as pieces of human writing in general? How did they make sure the subjects weren't aware of the authors they chose?

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#27
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.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#28
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...

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#29
post #25
post #16

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.

> 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. 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.

> Then the value of many ancient texts must be close to zero, because we often know nothing about the people who wrote them.

This is where imagination fills the gap and makes it interesting to think about.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#30
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.

Post reply on HN