Did you know AI Stories Get Hate — Yet Readers Can’t Seem to Look Away

 

There have been many studies done that claim most people prefer human-written content over AI-generated one but that is not the case, because people are spending equal amounts of time and money on both types of content. A new study wanted to find out how preference for human creativity affects consumer behavior, especially with a lot of AI-generated content on the rise which is affecting the jobs of millions of people.

To find how people perceive AI-generated stories, the researchers asked ChatGPT-4 to write a short story in the style of author Jason Brown. 654 participants were recruited to read the story and paid $3.50 for it. Half of the participants knew that the story is AI-generated while the other half were told that Jason Brown wrote it. When the participants read the first half of the story, they were asked to rate the quality of the story according to its emotional engagement and predictability. Participants’ willingness to read the rest of the story was also measured through their willingness to sacrifice a part of their payment or spend some extra time in transcribing text.

The results showed that the participants who knew that the story was AI-generated rated it more negatively in emotional engagement and predictability which shows that they were biased about AI. But these people were still willing to read the rest of the story and they also spent some time engaging with it. However, 40% of the participants admitted that they would have paid less if they knew that AI wrote the story.

The findings of this study show that people don't prefer human-generated work over AI, especially when it comes to their spending behavior. AI-generated content is cheaper to create so it can definitely affect human creators, leading to a saturation of human writers in the market. It will still take a lot of time for people to accept AI-generated content, especially if it makes a large amount of people lose their jobs.