{"slug": "we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows", "title": "We Want to Love Human Storytelling, But AI Is Simply More Engaging, Study Shows", "summary": "A new study from Villanova University found that people prefer AI-generated stories over human-written ones, rating them 6% higher in quality and 8% more engaging, and even more highly when they believed humans wrote them. The study, led by senior author Deena Weisberg, also found participants could only identify AI-generated content correctly 40% to 52% of the time, with AI-literate individuals more accurate and literature-background individuals less so.", "body_md": "Not only are people unable to tell the difference between stories written by humans or [artificial intelligence](https://time.com/article/2026/05/30/replace-reshape-how-ai-could-change-the-way-we-work/), they actually prefer it when the stories are created by [AI](https://time.com/article/2026/07/28/open-source-ai-hugging-face-openai/). And that’s especially true when they are told that the stories had human authors, according to a new study from Villanova University.\n\nThe [study](https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2026.10042) consisted of multiple experiments, all of which indicated a preference for AI. In the first, 1,682 participants were told to rate both the quality of six short stories they were given and how “engaging” they were. They were told, either correctly or incorrectly, who or what had authored each one.\n\n**Read More:** *Is AI Making Our Brains Weaker?*\n\nNot only were AI-generated stories found to be higher-quality (by 6%) and more engaging (by 8%), they were rated “even more highly,” researchers concluded, when participants believed that they were written by humans (by an additional 3%).\n\nDeena Weisberg, the senior author of the study and an associate professor from Villanova’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, said in a press release that the finding “reveals a bias towards narratives written by real people.”\n\nThat may be because “we assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience,” she said, explaining that it shows how “public assumptions about AI's capabilities are increasingly out of date.”\n\nFurthermore, people were only able to identify AI-generated content roughly 40% and 52% of the time in two subsequent experiments, each with over 400 participants. People who said they were AI-literate had more success, while people who claimed to have a background in literature were less accurate in their guesses.\n\n“Familiarity with AI systems appeared to help people recognize the patterns typical of AI-generated writing, such as em dashes and sentence structures such as ‘it’s not just X, it’s Y,’” Weisberg said. “That suggests that improving AI literacy would be one way to help people to navigate the new AI-enabled world that we’re living in.”\n\nCameron Jones, assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook University tells TIME that the study’s findings are not necessarily surprising, considering the history of [research](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1) going [back](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13939) [years](https://hai.stanford.edu/news/was-written-human-or-ai-tsu) that shows people’s diminishing ability to tell between artificial intelligence and humans.\n\nHe also points to the trajectory of his own studies, which look at whether people can differentiate between them in conversation. In those scenarios, he says, “The person actually gets to quiz the model and ask follow-up questions.”\n\nEven then, they had trouble distinguishing between human and generative content partners.\n\nJones says that this is because the large language models driving the content responses are trained to appeal to users.\n\n“We basically get the model to generate little bits of text, and then we get people to read them, and they give a thumbs up if they like what the model's saying and they give a thumbs down if they don't like what the model's saying,” he says.\n\nIt’s no surprise that people prefer the results, he explains, when “we're optimizing these models' outputs against our preferences.”\n\nIt can oversimplify output, but it leads to writing with higher overall appeal—whereas humans might write something truly exceptional that only caters to select tastes.\n\n“Real humans are weird and idiosyncratic, and they're very different from one another,” Jones says. “But models can kind of learn to be this kind of milquetoast everyman who appeals to everybody.”\n\nWhile the findings align with rising exposure to artificial intelligence, along with algorithmic reward systems for broadly approachable content on platforms like TikTok, Weisberg does not think that the current digital landscape is to blame for the results. She says, “Technologies amplify existing tendencies, rather than creating them.”\n\nPlus, she adds, the human-authored content might have simply challenged readers more.\n\n“AI writing tends to be clearer, more direct and easier to process,” she said. And it’s reasonable for participants to find themselves more deeply engaged with content that offers greater predictability and less friction.\n\nIn other words, Weisberg says, “Difficult or subtle material requires more brainpower.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows", "canonical_source": "https://time.com/article/2026/08/04/is-ai-telling-better-stories-than-us/", "published_at": "2026-08-03 20:20:19+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-04 23:13:00.453210+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Villanova University", "Deena Weisberg", "Cameron Jones", "Stony Brook University", "TIME"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-want-to-love-human-storytelling-but-ai-is-simply-more-engaging-study-shows.jsonld"}}