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.
Do people prefer stories written by AI?
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Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#42LLM 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.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#43This 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.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#44Very 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.
"Art is in the eye of the beholder" - it is me, who enjoys art and how it affects me and works with my emotions that is affected by it. Who or what the artist is, should be irrelevant, unless the artist imposes some monetary value I want to profit from at some point.
I don’t think the artist should be irrelevant - the art is the expression of the artist’s emotions. Knowing about the artist unlocks a lot of depth in the art, it’s an attempt to share and express their perspective through creative means.
Not to say how you decide to consume art isn’t valid (there is no proper definition after all). However, you’re doing a disservice to a lot of artists by dismissing their role in it all.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#45I’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 arbit…
YES. Well said. This is why I want to know which text is from human thought labour. To read text or to consume outputs of human minds is to learn about those minds and how those minds might work. There's a deep loss in having no mind to learn about in the subtext of the specific knowledge content written... I never knew this potential was there (for me) until it started to disappear as a domain of my interest and ent…
This.
It also just occurred to me, inspired by your comment, that getting to know a mind is more than just satisfying your curiosity; personal experience confirms for me that as soon as I interacted with a brilliant mind, some of that shone back on me, and made me a tad more brilliant as well.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#46No. 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.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#47I'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.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#48Here 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
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#49That'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 priorit…
> 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. Why would they not? > They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, But I do, and it's very clear that the online communities I frequent prefer people write in their own voice, even with very bad grammar and spelling…
Of course more than zero people actually use tiktok for educational purposes and like healthy foods. I'm talking about how questions like that ("do you prefer imperfect human writing or AI writing?", "what do you use tiktok for?", "do you stop reading if you know something is written by LLM?") are ill-designed for questionnaires.
Tests like the OP's link are slightly more meaningful to find out people's true preferences. But of course the best way is still A/B test and tracking user behavior. Anyone has done any form of behavioral tests, online or not, would understand that what people actually do is vastly different from what they think they do. The correlation is often negative.
Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?
#50Every 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.