Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence.

But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the story poorly, a sign that people distrust and dislike AI-generated art.

“People don’t like when they think a story is written by AI, whether it was or not,” said Haoran “Chris” Chu, Ph.D., a professor of public relations at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. “AI is good at writing something that is consistent, logical and coherent. But it is still weaker at writing engaging stories than people are.”

The quality of AI stories could help people like public health workers create compelling narratives to reach people and encourage healthy behaviors, such as vaccination, said Chu, an expert in public health and science communication. Chu and his co-author, Sixiao Liu, Ph.D., of the University of Central Florida, published their findings Sept. 13 in the Journal of Communication.

The researchers exposed people to two different versions of the same stories. One was written by a person and the other by ChatGPT. Survey participants then rated how engaged they were with the stories.

To test how people’s beliefs about AI influenced their ratings, Chu and Liu changed how the stories were labeled. Sometimes the AI story was correctly labeled as written by a computer. Other times people were told it was written by a human. The human-authored stories also had their labels swapped.

The surveys focused on two key elements of narratives: counterarguing — the experience of picking a story apart — and transportation. These two story components work at odds with one another.

“Transportation is a very familiar experience,” Chu said. “It’s the feeling of being so engrossed in the narrative you don’t feel the sticky seats in the movie theater anymore. Because people are so engaged, they often lower their defenses to the persuasive content in the narrative and reduce their counterarguing.”

While people generally rated AI stories as just as persuasive as their human-authored counterparts, the computer-written stories were not as good as transporting people into the world of the narrative.

“AI does not write like a master writer. That’s probably good news for people like Hollywood screenwriters — for now,” Chu said.