Study: People prefer stories written by AI
All study materials and measures are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/d8f6m/). We used three fictional short stories written by human authors, which were published in a reputable literary journal or short story collection. We then used ChatGPT to generate three corresponding fictional short stories.
- ▪All study materials and measures are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/d8f6m/).
- ▪We used three fictional short stories written by human authors, which were published in a reputable literary journal or short story collection.
- ▪We then used ChatGPT to generate three corresponding fictional short stories.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 8 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ People prefer stories written by AI when told they're written by a human — Hacker News (AI / LLM)
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,004 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Cambridge Core |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/bot-or-not-can-people-tell-the-difference-between-stories-written-by-a-human-or-by-an-ai-system/45E6DC0BB90AA648654D5AE243F6C667 |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:28:10 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T11:45:45.634Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T11:45:45.634Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | FRTAbf8Lhxwd · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
2.1.2. Materials This study was not preregistered. All study materials and measures are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/d8f6m/). Stories. We used three fictional short stories written by human authors, which were published in a reputable literary journal or short story collection. We then used ChatGPT to generate three corresponding fictional short stories. All stories had word counts of approximately 1,000 words (equating to approximately a five-minute read). This length was long enough for participants to have a sense of the writing style and be potentially absorbed by the story and also short enough for participants to be fully engaged throughout the whole story. The first human-written story was titled ‘FISH’.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Cambridge Core.
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