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Do people prefer stories written by AI?

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Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#61

Post by dofm »

jan_m_savage wrote: post #45
patcon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We always want to be among the people we imagine or visualise our future better selves to be. It's such an absolutely fundamental part of humanity (it is how children become adults, too)

The reason "AI artists" engage in a spiral of angrily and defensively explaining that their process is not just pushing a button, or trying to project AI-like attributes onto existing things like "covering someone else's song" (which is what the Fender CEO recently did!!) is that we all know that, deep down, using AI to do creative things people did is less in at least some way. It's avoiding some emotional labour.

People who know this less is a big part of what they do are the ones who need to reckon with it.

Everyone else is free to mentally downgrade it just like they also mentally downgrade excessive photoshop, overproduction, etc., and they will.

It took a generation for the world to find any kind of accommodation with what photoshop is capable of, what is appropriate and what is not, and there are aspects we are still justifiably angry about (fraud, deception, body image). AI artists seem in a hurry to have their own use normalised; they want people to hurry up and get over it and use it themselves so they don't feel bad.

Many photographers have developed rules for what they will and will not retouch, even a century before photoshop — for example, if the spot on someone's face won't be there in a fortnight, it maybe even shouldn't be in a photograph that is intended to be a long-lasting, somewhat authoritative representation of that person. But this took a long time to become any kind of cultural norm.

I think AI-only coders and CEOs are also in this "hurry up and get over it so I feel OK about my choices" phase, and I think we need to see this in a clear-minded way if we are to confront its impacts.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#62

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

skeledrew wrote: post #50
codeduck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> AI cannot create Say what now? - https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ai-is-inventing-molecules-... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/04/17/ai-solv... - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-025-01881-2

Not something novel, usually - but i can reproduce recombination results with intuition, which is kind of close enough. Still it lacks the striking direction of an artist/great mind and averages out.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#63

Post by p2detar »

jagenabler2 wrote: post #44
p2detar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> However, you’re doing a disservice to a lot of artists by dismissing their role in it all.

That is a false assumption. I do not dismiss the artist role, but I also would not be interested in the artist if their art does not move me. People generally do not know who Banksy is, but he is being defined by his art, not by his persona. That may very well happen for an AI agent sometime in the future.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#64

Post by AndrewDucker »

trainingonme wrote: post #14
fredley wrote: post #4

Very 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.

It does - but does this not potentially suggest that an LLM can produce "art"?

To me "art" is the communication of something from the artist, through arrangement of reality, to the person experiencing the art.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#65

Post by danielvaughn »

altruios wrote: post #58
danielvaughn wrote: post #36

"We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI's capabilities." It's not about the relative "creativity" of it. Art is fundamentally about communication. It's a social activity, whether you're reading a book or listening to music or looking at a painting. Even a mid-average author is going to make something mo…

Is art what is generated, or is art what is in the eye of the beholder? Do we find artistry in nature? What does it say about us that the sum average of us disgusts us on a visceral artistic level, is that the machine's fault for reflecting us accurately?

Art is a social activity whereby a human uses their creativity to produce an artifact that expresses some aspect of their experience, using non-standard forms of communication. It's a way of signaling to others "do you see what I see? do you feel what I feel?" The beauty of art exists on two layers: the aesthetic quality of the work, and the sense of shared experience among those who consume the art.

We find aesthetic beauty in nature; we do not find artistry.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#66

Post by p-e-w »

qlte wrote: post #60
p-e-w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No that makes them more interesting for the same reasons OP gave. You try to build a mental model of this mystery person from a mysterious time, where ever little detail could be a clue about them, their society/culture, or just trivial. With AI writing the answer is that everything is randomly averaged and thus trivial.

> You try to build a mental model of this mystery person from a mysterious time

I’ve read many ancient texts with great delight, and not once have I tried to “build a mental model” of their authors. It’s a dimension of literary analysis that has never interested me, even for authors (such as Kafka) whose personal lives are generally considered inseparable from their works.

The work stands on its own for me… or doesn’t, in which case learning about the circumstances of whoever wrote it won’t save it in my eyes.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#67

Post by dumberquestions »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #9
dumberquestions wrote: post #5

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…

No one really knows how this will play out, but it's still uncomfortable to think about robots figuring out how to reliably make things that look good, sound good and are full of meaning, would people still have any motivation to create? Would anything be considered good if everything is "good"? Of course things could turn out fine, I just wouldn't minimize the significance of what's happening.

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#68

Post by ausbah »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #62
skeledrew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI cannot create Say what now? - https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ai-is-inventing-molecules-... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/04/17/ai-solv... - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-025-01881-2

Not something novel, usually - but i can reproduce recombination results with intuition, which is kind of close enough. Still it lacks the striking direction of an artist/great mind and averages out.

but most of what humans create isn’t novel, esp in saturated areas like art. so even LLMs can “just do that” they’re very capable at outputting worthwhile materisl

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#69

Post by jake_and_fatman »

john_strinlai wrote: post #7

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

Yes! Reading all samples really drives home the study's conclusion that “people generally prefer predictability, because difficult material requires more brain power.” I could blow through the AI generated versions as I do Brandon Sanderson or JK Rowling because my brain was saying "yada yada yada, yeah I get it, how many sentences do you need to say the same thing."

Re: Do people prefer stories written by AI?

#70

Post by jake_and_fatman »

fredley wrote: post #4

Very 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.

For practical questions, I always prefer Claude's answer to a human's. Non-narcissistic and to the point. For entertainment, I'm less impatient, although unsurprisingly, most people view reading as homework and are happier to blow through a book written at a YA level. Brandon Sanderson a'int the king for nothing.
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