🤖 Beep? It’s not just beep—it’s .

Despite all the dead giveaways – the em dash, the ‘it’s not x, it’s y’ line, the emoji – this wasn’t AI-generated. A boring old human wrote it.

AI-generated writing is everywhere these days. In emails, award-winning books, pub menus and a surprising number of LinkedIn posts.

But a new study has suggested that people struggle to tell the difference between stories written by a human and those cobbled by AI.

In fact, as the study’s senior author tells , people prefer AI-written text – as long as they’re told a human penned it.

‘AI does have a somewhat distinct way of writing, a style that we can learn to recognise with experience,’ says Dr Deena Weisberg, from the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Villanova University.

‘And it is getting harder to tell this style apart from human writing, as new models are getting better at mimicking other styles.’

Weisberg and her team’s study, published in Judgement and Decision Making on Wednesday, asked participants to read stories.

Three were extracts from books written by real, flesh-and-bone humans, while ChatGPT, OpenAI’s model, made the rest.

Here are extracts from the six stories the participants read – can you tell the difference? Maybe, Weisberg says.

How did the study participants do?

The team did three tests, with the second and third asking 424 and 481 people, respectively, which one ChatGPT spat out.

In the second test, just 39.39% correctly picked which story was human, while 40.8% could tell ChatGPT was behind it.

In the third trial, which asked participants sharper questions that would also measure their AI know-how, 51.97% clocked it was non-human.

Here’s how they did for each test:

Test one:

• Second study, 31.43% correct. Third study, 45.39% correct

Test two:

• Second study, 52.82% correct. Third study, 66.67% correct

Test three:

• Second study, 33.8% correct. Third study, 43.29% correct

Researchers weren’t entirely sure why more people were able to figure out that FISH, the story about koi, in the second test, was authored by a person.

They suggest it would be that its plot and themes connected with them more. Or, more simply, the AI’s writing was worse.

In the first test, 1,682 adults aged between 18 and 81 were presented with the above stories.

They were asked to rate different things about them between -3 (strongly disagree) and +3 (strongly agree).

All in all, AI-generated stories were rated more highly when participants believed that a human sat down behind a desk and wrote them.

On average, people rated the AI-generated stories higher, at 1.54 for being well-written and 1.42 for story absorption.

This was higher than human-written texts, at 1.00 and 0.97 respectively.

‘It shows that people value authenticity’

If you looked under the hood of an AI model, you’d see something called a large language model.

This is a neural network – a robotic brain, kind of – that learns skills like writing by analysing text from across the internet.

It spots patterns in all this text – ‘how are you?’ tends to come after ‘hello’ – allowing it to replicate it.

‘So when you ask an AI system to generate a story, it draws from all of the stories it’s been trained on and assembles the new story, word by word, making predictions as it goes about the most likely next word,’ says Weisberg.

But the study doesn’t mean that AI is ‘better’ at writing than humans, though it is increasingly harder to tell the difference.

Instead, despite all the William Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels that AI has hoovered up, the biggest difference between it and an author may just be how people perceive them.

‘People value the authenticity of human-made art,’ says Weisberg.

‘People may also prefer art that has been created only by humans. I think that this finding also reveals the biases that people have about what AI systems are capable of.’

Similar studies have also found that readers may prefer sitting down with an AI book rather than human-authored works.

Yet polls still show that people distrust AI or doubt it’ll ever be as creative as a human, even as it advances at a breakneck speed.

‘So when they encounter a story that they like, they assume that it was written by a human and not an AI,’ Weisberg adds, ‘even though that may not be the case.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

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