Authors are at the forefront of the debate on the uses of artificial intelligence, given that generators based on this technology are capable of producing compelling narratives that can rival those written by humans in quality. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are keen to read them.

Researchers Hoaran Chu and Sixiao Liu conducted several experiments to find out how much people are interested in AI-generated works of fiction. They had several volunteers read two versions of the same story: one written by a human author, the other by ChatGPT.

Participants were then asked to rate each of these stories according to their persuasive quality and their ability to transport the reader into the world of the narrative. “Transportation is a very familiar experience,” Chu explained. “It’s the feeling of being so engrossed in the narrative you don’t feel the sticky seats in the movie theatre anymore.”

In their paper published in the Journal of Communication, the researchers explained that the volunteers found the stories generated by ChatGPT as interesting as those by a human – but they didn’t find them as captivating.

To challenge the participants’ assumptions, Chu and Liu switched how the stories were labelled, so that the story written by a human author was described as the work of ChatGPT, and vice-versa.

The findings show that readers are more critical of texts presented as being written by artificial intelligence, even if they actually aren’t.

“People don’t like it when they think a story is written by AI, whether it was or not. AI is good at writing something that is consistent, logical and coherent. But it is still weaker at writing engaging stories than people are,” Chu outlined.

This study shows how people may be resistant to the use of AI in literature: perhaps they consider the art to be too “human” to be generated by a machine.

That said, some writers are nevertheless using this technology in their literary creation. Japanese author Rie Kudan has admitted to using ChatGPT to write 5% of her futuristic novel “Tokyo-to Dojo-to”, for which she won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. At the award ceremony, the novelist declared that AI had enabled her to surpass her individual creative potential.

In China, Shen Yang won second prize at a science-fiction literary competition for “Land of Memories”, a short story written in three hours with the help of ChatGPT. Around 60 prompts were needed to achieve the resulting text.

So can we really all become authors thanks to AI? Perhaps. As the use of generative artificial intelligence becomes increasingly easier, it will no longer be necessary to master the fundamentals of writing to produce a more or less accomplished work of fiction.

But it’s unlikely that AI will produce a masterpiece capable of winning the favour of readers on a significant scale. “AI does not write like a master writer. That’s probably good news for people like Hollywood screenwriters – for now,” Chu concluded.