Oh great, readers preferred AI-written short stories over one by my favorite author in a blind test

The Sims 3 - a Sim with long blonde hir weaaring a green shirt grabs her head with both hands, screaming in dismay. — (Image credit: Electronic Arts)

"I hate that AI can do this," is my opinion for most every value of "this" that I've seen in the past couple years. It's also what fantasy author Mark Lawrence said after pitting AI writing against flash fiction written by award-winning authors and finding that not only can readers not reliably tell the difference in a blind test, they also preferred the AI-written stories.

Earlier this month, Lawrence composed a quiz on his blog (which you can still take) with eight very short fantasy stories of about 350 words, asking readers to rate each story's quality and whether they believe it was composed by a human or AI.

Much as we all want to believe that we can always spot AI writing by wit or by counting em dashes—a premise that forgets that human writers treat dashes like Pringles and should have them taken away by editors who are regrettably also human writers and susceptible to the same siren call of extra clauses—the reality is that we often can't, which sucks.

The short of it is that we can't stop AI-created art from spreading by spotting it in the wild and shaming it out of existence if we still can't reliably identify it. (Or if we're misidentifying it and harassing human-authored work, which happens too.) AI may be at a stumbling point this year, but it's going to take something more rigorous than the honor system and our own unreliable instincts to be sure we're reading work by humans.

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Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years.

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