Can you spot AI-written stories? Listen and find out

"Something is wrong with the fish in the koi pond outside my mother's floor-to-ceiling bedroom window." That line, read aloud on NPR's Short Wave, was the opening of a short story excerpt that host Mary Louise Kelly correctly guessed was written by a human — not by AI. The other excerpt, which began "In the stillness of the early morning, I find myself at the edge of a koi pond," was AI-generated. Kelly preferred the human-written one, but in a recent study, most participants could not tell the difference — and they tended to prefer the AI stories, especially when they thought those stories were written by people.

Why people can't spot AI writing — and why they might prefer it

The study, published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, involved several experiments. In one, participants read short stories (around 1,000 words each) that were either human-written or AI-generated. Some participants were correctly told the source; others were misled. In another experiment, participants were given pairs of stories — one human, one AI — and asked to identify which was which. The results: most people could not reliably distinguish AI from human writing. And when they thought an AI story was human-written, they rated it higher.