Artificial intelligence may be emerging as a serious challenger to human authors, according to new research comparing AI-generated fiction with stories written by people.

In a study published in the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three written by human authors and three generated by ChatGPT, with each AI story matching the theme of a human-written counterpart.

Participants were told whether the story they read had been written by a human or by AI, although this information was intentionally inaccurate for some readers.

They were then asked to rate the story’s quality, engagement and how absorbing they found it.

The findings showed that participants who read AI-generated stories generally rated them as more engaging, more absorbing and of higher quality than the human-written stories.

However, stories that participants believed were written by humans received higher ratings, regardless of their actual origin.

Senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, said, “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as, if not better than, human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”

However, Weisberg, herself a creative writer, said the findings do not mean authors should be replaced by AI. She argued that novels produced by artificial intelligence are likely to be fundamentally different from those written by humans.

“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.

“Humans write as a form of creative self-expression or to challenge ourselves, or to make sense of our experiences. The fact that AI can generate human-like stories doesn’t change any of that.”

The findings also indicate that people’s attitudes toward AI influence their perceptions. Participants who held more favourable views of artificial intelligence gave higher ratings to stories they believed were generated by ChatGPT than those with less positive opinions of the technology.

In two additional experiments involving 905 adults, participants were presented with two short stories on the same theme—one written by a human and the other generated by AI.

They were then asked to identify which story had been authored by a person and which had been produced by artificial intelligence.

In one experiment, only about 40% of participants correctly identified the AI-written story, performing worse than would be expected by chance. In the second experiment, 52 per cent correctly distinguished between the human- and AI-authored stories.

The researchers found that participants’ self-reported knowledge of fiction did not affect their ability to distinguish between human- and AI-written stories.