There is an Asimov story called "Someday" in which a toy computer called a Bard generates random fairy tales and reads them to children.
In the story two children try to hack their Bard, to make it tell more interesting modern stories, by feeding it a new vocabulary of modern words. In the end, it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned.
I really feel like that story embodies today's AI generated stories. I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time.
I always enjoy spotting a good anachronism in a sci-fi story (societies with space travel but still use typewriters), but this is a case of really spot on prediction.
> I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time.
Not a universal solution, but a working method to get at least sometimes interesting results. You should use it as a co-authoring tool by following these hints: treat this as a dialogue ("let’s create interactively, you and me…", "create a first sentence of a fictional story", ...), where you act like a semaphore for the continuation—judging the current output and either correcting it or suggesting the next step (which can be brief and expanded later by the LLM). Finally, try to suggest unexpected constraints. This can be effective because when your constraint contains a set of words rarely seen together in training data, the output becomes somewhat random but still at least partially grounded in reality.
An example from one of my old conversations with Llama 3.1:
> User: Create a sentence from a fictional book containing the words crazy, cowboy, and gadget.
> Llama: In the wild west town of Crazy Horse, a notorious cowboy named Buckshot Bob unveiled his latest gadget — a mechanical horse that could gallop at breakneck speed.
> it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned.
I think you're leaving out the best part! I don't want to spoil it, it's a short story. Classic trope, but still. Story here[0]
On another note, as an avid SciFi lover I have always found it interesting that in books, movies, and shows there have been many machines that talk and do complex tasks yet no one ever thought they were alive. Just take Star Trek. The simulations in the Holodeck are highly realistic and intended to mimic real humans. Or even the computer is able to speak and write code as requested. Far more advanced than our systems today. There's even that famous episode in TNG with Data where they are questioning if he is actually alive or not. Not such an easy thing but yet every viewer probably thought he was and recognized the difference between him and the computer and Holodeck[1]. Though my favorite version of that question is in Asimov's The Positronic Man (basis of the movie Bicentennial Man and yes, Asimov is why Data has a Positronic brain). These are fiction, but I find this so interesting. I feel like our LLMs look much more like the computer from Star Trek than the Holograms let alone Data. Yet, I think there's a lot of disagreement about the level of intelligence of these systems and it makes me wonder why someone would say the computer in Star Trek isn't intelligent but the LLM is (I'm sure there's retconning too).
In Star Trek, the computer is framed as an appliance. It's the ship's operating system. The characters treat it like a highly advanced Alexa. They issue commands ("Tea, Earl Grey, hot"), ask for information, and expect a transactional response. No one ever asks the computer, "How are you feeling today?" because the narrative has established it doesn't have feelings. It's a tool, and we, the audience, accept this premise.
In contrast, the entire point of Data's character is to question the line between machine and person. The episode you mentioned is a courtroom drama specifically designed to force the characters (and the audience) to see him as a sentient being with rights. His "positronic brain" is the magical Asimovian hand-waving that signals to the audience: "This one is different. Pay attention."
'The Author' could have easily positioned the computer or the holodeck in a similar manner and people would agree it was sentient. Or Star Wars droids could easily be given more of this kind of weight than they are currently given.
It's one thing to read a fictional story about a fictional technology and assume the position and framing the God is pushing you to, it's another thing entirely to have the technology in your hands and play around with it.
I don't know if anyone has officially said so but there was a public statement about it being chosen as a reference to story telling (Celtic language). So could be for similar reasons or could be a reference. Not surprising considering how famous the story is and how famous Asimov is. But maybe someone else knows more definitively.
I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.
> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium.
Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.
> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.
If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.
> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
Agreed. Have a read through the 10 dragon stories - the majority of them are rich in spices, but bereft otherwise.
LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.
As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.
Having tried to use AI as a technical cofounder (in small scale experiments), nah it's not there yet. It's more like having a herd of interns. With close supervision there can be a lot of productivity but without a good deal of taste and expertise it's just going to be garbage unless you're very lucky.
I also think that just having “an idea” isn’t exactly the same as increasing net creativity. Oftentimes with art, the impact of something truly creative results in changing the parameters of the medium or genre itself, not merely sticking to the script and producing a new work in the style of X. If you take, for example, J Dilla and his impact on hip-hop, the fact that there’s an entire subgenre or two focused on some of his hallmark innovations (micro-rhythm/wonky beats, neo-soul, lofi sampling/creative use of samples) speaks to that kind of “real” creativity. I frankly think that kind of genre-bending is possible with the use of LLMs, but if you just say, “here’s my story idea, make it so”, without any eye towards the actual technique or craft, you won’t be getting the next Blood Meridian out of it.
I think that's an odd way of viewing creativity: unless you can pull off the whole thing, you're not really creative/
What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help? Heck, what about most sci-fi writers? Their editors often do a lot of heavy lifting to make the final product good.
If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help? Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?
I'm not disputing that a lot of people don't use these tools this way. In fact, that was exactly my point. If your "idea" is to crank out deceptive drivel, I'm not defending that.
And they haven't even gotten around to adding advertising into them yet! Imagine when chat assistants subtly steer you towards certain products. Would you even know it was manipulating you?
They kind of did though. Thing tries to make me generate diagrams every step of the way (as a kind of feature demo), even though they're rarely ever a good idea, and even when they are, the pictures and diagrams generated are useless.
Wondering if anyone had success with this yet. I have several ideas for poetry and prose that I don't have the skill to pull off. I periodically plug them into new models and so far all the results have been completely unsatisfactory.
Why, exactly, is creativity good? What is the benefit, and to whom? Does that benefit survive the interposition of genAI? I'm doubtful, either for the reader or the craftsmen.
Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good.
For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.
And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own?
Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
Plot twist, people who do first drafts and structural edits with AI can still do line edits and copy edits by hand for personal voice (and you have to anyhow if you want the prose to be exceptional).
I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful.
Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
> A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
The only AI generated fiction I read is stuff I create on the fly. Why would you read AI generated fiction made by other people when it’s the same as reading regular fiction?
Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking?
It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.
Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI.
(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)
(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
I thought it was interesting/telling (but maybe not surprising) that the AI-generated stories scored the highest according to reader rankings, yet pinged to me as immediately flat and generic. But I really liked the idiosyncrasies of a few of the human-authored entries!
Here are my notes and guesses on the stories in case people here find it interesting. Like some others in the blog post comments I got 6/8 right:
1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT)
2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT)
3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT)
4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful characterization (INCORRECT)
5.) I like the style but it's probably AI, the metaphors are too dense and very minor continuity errors (CORRECT)
6.) some genuinely funny stuff and good world building, almost certainly human (CORRECT)
7.) probably AI prompted to go for humor, some minor continuity issues (CORRECT)
8.) nicely subverted expectations, probably human (CORRECT)
My personal ranking for scores (again blind to author) was:
So for me the two best stories were human and the two worst were AI. That said, I read a lot of flash fiction, and none of these stories really approached good flash imo. I've also done some of my own experiments, and AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
The only one I was fairly sure was human was #6, and that was the only one I kinda enjoyed. In any case, as someone who reads a good deal, I agree. I didn't think any of the stories was particularly great (not enough to bother ranking them, beyond favourite) so I don't care all that much about the result.
> AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
How sophisticated, compared to just writing the thing yourself?
I enjoy writing so a system like this would never replace that for me. But for someone who doesn't enjoy writing (or maybe can't generate work that meets their bar in the Ira Glass sense of taste) I think this kind of setup works okay for generating flash even with today's models.
Could you expand on your point re more sophisticated prompting?
I have found it hard to replicate high quality human-written prose and was a bit surprised by the results of this test. To me, AI fiction (and most AI writing in general) has a certain “smell” that becomes obvious after enough exposure to it. And yet I scored worse than you did on the test, so what do I know…
For flash you can get much better results by asking the system to first generate a detailed scaffold. Here's an example of some metadata you might try to generate before actually writing the story: genres the story should fit into; pov of the story;
high level structure of the story; list of characters in the story along with significant details; themes and topics present in the story; detailed style notes
From there you have a second prompt to generate a story that follows those details. You can also generate many candidates and have another model instance rate the stories based on both general literary criteria and how well the fit the prompt, then you only read the best.
This has produced some work I've been reasonably impressed by, though it's not at the level of the best human flash writers.
Also, one easy way to get stuff that completely avoids the "smell" you're talking about by giving specific guidance on style and perspective (e.g., GPT-5 Thinking can do "literary stream-of-consciousness 1st person teenage perspective" reasonably well and will not sound at all like typical model writing).
I had similar results, and story 4 is so trope heavy I wonder if it’s just an amalgamation of similar stories. The human stories all felt original, where none of the AI ones did.
I'm not sure I agree that the human stories felt original. I was pretty unimpressed with all of the stories except maybe 6, and even that one dealt in some common tropes. 5 had fewer tropes than 6 (and maybe as a result of that received the highest average scores from his readers) but I could tell from the style it was AI
I was surprised at the result, and even more surprised when I read that one of the authors who did the test got 4 out of 5 wrong, and rated 2 of the AI stories highly.
Looking at my notes, I got one wrong (story 5, dunno what the "name" was supposed to be, assumed that the "name" is something widely-known in culture that brings about the end times, a something that I didn't know about, and so marked it as Human because of a supposed reference to a shared cultural knowledge), and all the AI written stories I rated at either 1 or two points, with the lowest Human-written story getting 3 and the highest getting 5 (Story 1).
It makes me wonder if we are over-estimating the skill an author has when reading based on their demonstrated skill when writing.
IOW, according to my notes/performance, the AI stories were easy to spot and correlated with low scores anyway, while the author(s), who actually produced high-rated stuff for me, rated my low-rated stuff as high.
ai fiction really shines in baffling surreal prompts that it tries hard to satisfy. Here's an example:
"let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail"
I think if you compared the AI stories to works by “top” authors, the results wouldn’t really be as close. No one is confusing a story by Kafka or Conrad with a ChatGPT one.
Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't reading Nabokov.
My personal litmus test that works fairly effectively with these AI generated stories is this - if someone asked you "What was the story about?" - could you reply with anything more substantial than the prompt that was given to generate the story to begin with?
Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean.
That's probably true, but as the author points out, it's still interesting to see where the boundary is at the moment. It's a lot further along than people typically argue imo.
I don’t really find it that surprising - if you write generic low-quality stories, it’s difficult to differentiate your work from an AI writing generic low-quality stories. People have been selling slop stories on Amazon for a long time before AI tools, so describing them as professional authors is not exactly damning here.
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In the story two children try to hack their Bard, to make it tell more interesting modern stories, by feeding it a new vocabulary of modern words. In the end, it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned.
I really feel like that story embodies today's AI generated stories. I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time.
I always enjoy spotting a good anachronism in a sci-fi story (societies with space travel but still use typewriters), but this is a case of really spot on prediction.
Not a universal solution, but a working method to get at least sometimes interesting results. You should use it as a co-authoring tool by following these hints: treat this as a dialogue ("let’s create interactively, you and me…", "create a first sentence of a fictional story", ...), where you act like a semaphore for the continuation—judging the current output and either correcting it or suggesting the next step (which can be brief and expanded later by the LLM). Finally, try to suggest unexpected constraints. This can be effective because when your constraint contains a set of words rarely seen together in training data, the output becomes somewhat random but still at least partially grounded in reality.
An example from one of my old conversations with Llama 3.1:
> User: Create a sentence from a fictional book containing the words crazy, cowboy, and gadget.
> Llama: In the wild west town of Crazy Horse, a notorious cowboy named Buckshot Bob unveiled his latest gadget — a mechanical horse that could gallop at breakneck speed.
On another note, as an avid SciFi lover I have always found it interesting that in books, movies, and shows there have been many machines that talk and do complex tasks yet no one ever thought they were alive. Just take Star Trek. The simulations in the Holodeck are highly realistic and intended to mimic real humans. Or even the computer is able to speak and write code as requested. Far more advanced than our systems today. There's even that famous episode in TNG with Data where they are questioning if he is actually alive or not. Not such an easy thing but yet every viewer probably thought he was and recognized the difference between him and the computer and Holodeck[1]. Though my favorite version of that question is in Asimov's The Positronic Man (basis of the movie Bicentennial Man and yes, Asimov is why Data has a Positronic brain). These are fiction, but I find this so interesting. I feel like our LLMs look much more like the computer from Star Trek than the Holograms let alone Data. Yet, I think there's a lot of disagreement about the level of intelligence of these systems and it makes me wonder why someone would say the computer in Star Trek isn't intelligent but the LLM is (I'm sure there's retconning too).
[0] https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/sffaudio-usa/mp3s/Someda...
[1] Well there is Voyager. And that episode from TNG. But go read [0] ;)
In Star Trek, the computer is framed as an appliance. It's the ship's operating system. The characters treat it like a highly advanced Alexa. They issue commands ("Tea, Earl Grey, hot"), ask for information, and expect a transactional response. No one ever asks the computer, "How are you feeling today?" because the narrative has established it doesn't have feelings. It's a tool, and we, the audience, accept this premise.
In contrast, the entire point of Data's character is to question the line between machine and person. The episode you mentioned is a courtroom drama specifically designed to force the characters (and the audience) to see him as a sentient being with rights. His "positronic brain" is the magical Asimovian hand-waving that signals to the audience: "This one is different. Pay attention."
'The Author' could have easily positioned the computer or the holodeck in a similar manner and people would agree it was sentient. Or Star Wars droids could easily be given more of this kind of weight than they are currently given.
It's one thing to read a fictional story about a fictional technology and assume the position and framing the God is pushing you to, it's another thing entirely to have the technology in your hands and play around with it.
The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.
Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.
> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.
If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.
> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.
As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.
We have art, games and movie directors
AI just enables anyone to be a "director", but most people can't direct anything worthwhile
What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help? Heck, what about most sci-fi writers? Their editors often do a lot of heavy lifting to make the final product good.
If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help? Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?
I'm not disputing that a lot of people don't use these tools this way. In fact, that was exactly my point. If your "idea" is to crank out deceptive drivel, I'm not defending that.
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Why, exactly, is creativity good? What is the benefit, and to whom? Does that benefit survive the interposition of genAI? I'm doubtful, either for the reader or the craftsmen.
For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.
And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like).
This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human):
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds
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This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html).
It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.
(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)
(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
Yeah, we've moved forward a ways in the last 4 decades, or the top of the market has, at least. That was a fun read, though.
> Our relationship / is beautiful / because / it is ours / because / it relates / to us.
Indistinguishable from Rupi Kaur. There is nothing new under the sun.
1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT) 2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT) 3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT) 4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful characterization (INCORRECT) 5.) I like the style but it's probably AI, the metaphors are too dense and very minor continuity errors (CORRECT) 6.) some genuinely funny stuff and good world building, almost certainly human (CORRECT) 7.) probably AI prompted to go for humor, some minor continuity issues (CORRECT) 8.) nicely subverted expectations, probably human (CORRECT)
My personal ranking for scores (again blind to author) was:
6 (human); 8 (human); 4 (AI); 1 (human) and 5 (AI) -- tied; 2 (human); 3 and 7 (AI) -- tied
So for me the two best stories were human and the two worst were AI. That said, I read a lot of flash fiction, and none of these stories really approached good flash imo. I've also done some of my own experiments, and AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
> AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
How sophisticated, compared to just writing the thing yourself?
I enjoy writing so a system like this would never replace that for me. But for someone who doesn't enjoy writing (or maybe can't generate work that meets their bar in the Ira Glass sense of taste) I think this kind of setup works okay for generating flash even with today's models.
I have found it hard to replicate high quality human-written prose and was a bit surprised by the results of this test. To me, AI fiction (and most AI writing in general) has a certain “smell” that becomes obvious after enough exposure to it. And yet I scored worse than you did on the test, so what do I know…
From there you have a second prompt to generate a story that follows those details. You can also generate many candidates and have another model instance rate the stories based on both general literary criteria and how well the fit the prompt, then you only read the best.
This has produced some work I've been reasonably impressed by, though it's not at the level of the best human flash writers.
Also, one easy way to get stuff that completely avoids the "smell" you're talking about by giving specific guidance on style and perspective (e.g., GPT-5 Thinking can do "literary stream-of-consciousness 1st person teenage perspective" reasonably well and will not sound at all like typical model writing).
Looking at my notes, I got one wrong (story 5, dunno what the "name" was supposed to be, assumed that the "name" is something widely-known in culture that brings about the end times, a something that I didn't know about, and so marked it as Human because of a supposed reference to a shared cultural knowledge), and all the AI written stories I rated at either 1 or two points, with the lowest Human-written story getting 3 and the highest getting 5 (Story 1).
It makes me wonder if we are over-estimating the skill an author has when reading based on their demonstrated skill when writing.
IOW, according to my notes/performance, the AI stories were easy to spot and correlated with low scores anyway, while the author(s), who actually produced high-rated stuff for me, rated my low-rated stuff as high.
"let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail"
After some back and forth, here is what I got:
https://9ol.es/md/trump
No human would write something that crazy...
Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't reading Nabokov.
Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean.
https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin...