In the first experiment, each of the 1,682 participants read one of six short stories, each about 1,000 words long. Three came from well-known literary magazines and short story collections. The other three were generated using ChatGPT 4.0, with prompts based on the theme, style, and narrative perspective of the human originals.
Half the participants were told the story was written by a human. The other half were told it came from ChatGPT. That information was accurate for only half the participants in each group, according to researchers Sydney Sears and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in their study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making.
Participants read either a human-written or an AI-generated story and were told either the truth or a lie about who wrote it. | Image: Sears and Weisberg (2026)
ChatGPT's stories were rated significantly higher than the human-written texts on both perceived quality and immersion. For quality, the mean score for AI stories was 1.54 compared to 0.97 for human stories on a scale from minus 3 to plus 3. For immersion, the gap was 1.42 versus 1.00.
AI stories (left) were rated higher for perceived quality than human stories (right). When participants were told a human wrote the story (orange), ratings in both groups were higher than when the story was attributed to AI (blue). | Image: Sears and Weisberg (2026)
