Do readers prefer AI-generated Italian short stories?
For literary scholars and AI developers, it challenges assumptions about reader preference for human-authored fiction.
This study found that readers slightly preferred AI-generated Italian short stories over one by renowned author Alberto Moravia, though differences were modest and not statistically significant.
This study investigates whether readers prefer AI-generated short stories in Italian over one written by a renowned Italian author. In a blind setup, 20 participants read and evaluated three stories, two created with ChatGPT-4o and one by Alberto Moravia, without being informed of their origin. To explore potential influencing factors, reading habits and demographic data, comprising age, gender, education and first language, were also collected. The results showed that the AI-written texts received slightly higher average ratings and were more frequently preferred, although differences were modest. No statistically significant associations were found between text preference and demographic or reading-habit variables. These findings challenge assumptions about reader preference for human-authored fiction and raise questions about the necessity of synthetic-text editing in literary contexts.