New research, however, by ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ scholars Martin Abel (economics) and Reed Johnson (Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies) casts doubt on this assertion.
“While consumers may hold beliefs about the intrinsic value of human labor, many seem unwilling to put their money where their beliefs are,” they wrote recently in , a news site that highlights the work of academic researchers.
With AI generating an ever-larger share of all creative output, the role of human-created art and our attitudes to it are increasingly important, say Abel and Johnson.
Their involved asking an advanced AI tool to generate a short story in the style of the critically acclaimed fiction author and ³Õºº¾ãÀÖ²¿ alumnus (Class of '91). “We then recruited a nationally representative sample of over 650 people and offered participants $3.50 to read and assess the AI-generated story. Crucially, only half the participants were told that the story was written by AI, while the other half was misled into believing it was the work of Jason Brown.”
Midway through reading the story, participants were asked various questions about how they rated the work: Did they find it emotionally engaging? Predictable? Evocative? and so on.
The group that knew the story was AI-generated had a more negative view of it, finding it less authentic and evocative. “These results are largely in keeping with a nascent but growing body of research that shows bias against AI in areas like visual art, music and poetry,” wrote Abel and Johnson.
Surprisingly, however, these two groups showed no difference in how much they were willing to pay from their study compensation to read to the end of the story—despite the fact that 40 percent of participants said they would pay less to read an AI-generated work. In other words, these beliefs about the greater value of human-created stories don’t seem to translate into how much money people are actually willing to pay to read them.
This research is important, say Abel and Johnson, because it challenges “past studies showing people favor human-produced works over AI-generated ones … The potential implications for the future of human-created work are profound, especially in market conditions in which AI-generated work can be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce.”
To illustrate this, the authors pointed out that even though the technology is still in its infancy, the increasing number of AI-generated books on the market has prompted the Authors Guild to introduce its own labeling guidelines to try to “preserve authenticity in literature,” as the organization puts it.
Abel’s and Johnson’s research raises questions about whether such measures will be effective in stemming the tide of AI-generated creative content.
Their was reposted in numerous other media outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Yahoo! News.
