Nine-year-old children outperformed ChatGPT in emotion: Evidence from Chinese writing
This research addresses the relative strengths of AI versus children in writing for educational and AI development contexts, but it is incremental as it builds on prior comparisons of ChatGPT and children.
The study compared ChatGPT and nine-year-old children in Chinese writing on narrative and scientific topics, finding that children outperformed in fluency and cohesion, while ChatGPT was more accurate, and children conveyed stronger emotions.
ChatGPT has been demonstrated to possess significant capabilities in generating intricate, human-like text, and recent studies have established that its performance in theory of mind tasks is comparable to that of a nine-year-old child. However, it remains uncertain whether ChatGPT surpasses nine-year-old children in Chinese writing proficiency. To explore this, our study juxtaposed the Chinese writing performance of ChatGPT and nine-year-old children on both narrative and scientific topics, aiming to uncover the relative strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in writing. The collected data were analyzed across five linguistic dimensions: fluency, accuracy, complexity, cohesion, and emotion. Each dimension underwent assessment through precise indices. The findings revealed that nine-year-old children excelled beyond ChatGPT in terms of fluency and cohesion within their writing. In contrast, ChatGPT manifested a superior performance in accuracy compared to the children. Concerning complexity, children exhibited superior skills in science-themed writing, while ChatGPT prevailed in nature-themed writing. Significantly, this research is pioneering in revealing that nine-year-old children convey stronger emotions than ChatGPT in their Chinese compositions.