Summary: New research shows that stories generated by AI, such as ChatGPT, are almost as good as those written by humans. However, when people are told a story is AI-generated, they rate it more negatively, revealing a bias against AI-created content.
Although AI stories are coherent and logical, they are less effective at immersing readers in the narrative compared to human writers. This study highlights how perceptions of AI influence the reception of its creative output, despite its potential in fields like public health communication.
Key Facts:
- AI-generated stories are rated lower when people know AI wrote them.
- AI stories are logical and persuasive but less immersive than human-written ones.
- Bias against AI-generated content affects how people judge its quality.
Source: University of Florida
Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence.
But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the story poorly, a sign that people distrust and dislike AI-generated art.
“People don’t like when they think a story is written by AI, whether it was or not,” said Haoran “Chris” Chu, Ph.D., a professor of public relations at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. “AI is good at writing something that is consistent, logical and coherent. But it is still weaker at writing engaging stories than people are.”
The quality of AI stories could help people like public health workers create compelling narratives to reach people and encourage healthy behaviors, such as vaccination, said Chu, an expert in public health and science communication.
Chu and his co-author, Sixiao Liu, Ph.D., of the University of Central Florida, published their findings Sept. 13 in the Journal of Communication.
The researchers exposed people to two different versions of the same stories. One was written by a person and the other by ChatGPT. Survey participants then rated how engaged they were with the stories.
To test how people’s beliefs about AI influenced their ratings, Chu and Liu changed how the stories were labeled. Sometimes the AI story was correctly labeled as written by a computer. Other times people were told it was written by a human. The human-authored stories also had their labels swapped.
The surveys focused on two key elements of narratives: counterarguing — the experience of picking a story apart — and transportation. These two story components work at odds with one another.
“Transportation is a very familiar experience,” Chu said. “It’s the feeling of being so engrossed in the narrative you don’t feel the sticky seats in the movie theater anymore. Because people are so engaged, they often lower their defenses to the persuasive content in the narrative and reduce their counterarguing.”
While people generally rated AI stories as just as persuasive as their human-authored counterparts, the computer-written stories were not as good as transporting people into the world of the narrative.
“AI does not write like a master writer. That’s probably good news for people like Hollywood screenwriters — for now,” Chu said.
About this AI and psychology research news
Author: Eric Hamilton
Source: University of Florida
Contact: Eric Hamilton – University of Florida
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Can AI tell good stories? Narrative transportation and persuasion with ChatGPT” by Haoran “Chris” Chu et al. Journal of Communication
Abstract
Can AI tell good stories? Narrative transportation and persuasion with ChatGPT
Storytelling is a human universal. The ubiquity of stories and the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose important questions: can AI like ChatGPT tell engaging and persuasive stories? If so, what makes a narrative engaging and persuasive?
Three pre-registered experiments comparing human-generated narratives from existing research and the ChatGPT-generated versions using descriptions and materials from these studies show that labeling AI as a narrative source led to lower transportation, higher counterarguing, and lower story-consistent beliefs.
However, AI-generated narratives led to lower (Study 1 and 3) or similar levels (Study 2) of counterarguing than the human-generated version. Readers showed lower (Study 2) or similar levels of transportation (Study 1 and 3) when reading the AI- than the human-generated stories.
We suggest the AI model’s linguistic competence and logical coherence contribute to its stories’ verisimilitude. However, AI’s lack of lived experience and creativity may limit its storytelling ability.
