Archive · 13 Aug 2026
Study Finds AI-Generated Stories Rated More Engaging Than Human Ones
Scientists at several universities did a study together.
They published it in a journal called Judgment and Decision Making.
They wanted to know if people enjoy stories written by computers as much as stories written by people.
The readers in the study got six short stories.
Three of the stories were written by people, and three were written by a computer program called ChatGPT.
The computer stories were about similar topics to the human stories.
The readers were told whether a person or a computer wrote each story, but the information was not always accurate.
The readers rated how engaging, or interesting, each story was.
In the end, the stories written by ChatGPT got higher ratings than the human stories.
A multi-university study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making compared reader engagement for human- and AI-written short stories.
Readers reviewed six short stories: three written by humans and three generated by ChatGPT, with each AI story similar in theme to a human one.
Participants were told whether each story was human- or AI-written, though this information was not always accurate.
The AI-generated stories received higher engagement ratings than the human-written stories.
The article opens with famous ultra-short stories by Ernest Hemingway and Fredric Brown as context for the study.
- Who
- Researchers from multiple universities, study participants, and readers; ChatGPT generated the AI stories.
- What
- A study found that short stories generated by ChatGPT were rated as more engaging than human-written stories.
- When
- Not specified; the study was described as new at the time of the report, and a referenced story dates from 1948.
- Where
- Not specified; the study was published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making.
- Why
- To examine whether AI-generated stories can compete with human storytelling in reader engagement.
- Journal
- Judgment and Decision Making
- Total stories in study
- 6
- Human-written stories
- 3
- AI-generated stories (ChatGPT)
- 3
- Rating criteria
- How engaging the stories were
- Key finding
- AI-generated stories received higher engagement ratings than human-written ones
- Disclosure to readers
- Told whether each story was human- or AI-written, though not always accurately