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Life.Culture.Discovery.

Can you spot a story written by AI vs one penned by a human author? 2 award-winning flesh-and-blood writers take on ChatGPT

  • Post Magazine challenged two award-winning authors to take on ChatGPT at writing flash fiction, following the same rules and with the same conditions
  • Can you tell which uses a human brain and experience and which uses an electronic brain and collated information?

Reading Time:4 minutes
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Can you tell the difference between AI-generated fiction and a story written by a human? This image was produced by Bernard Cohen with the assistance of NightCafe.

“Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of,” philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari recently wrote, pointing out that everything – from our gods to human rights to money – is a cultural artefact created from the stories we’ve told. “What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories?”

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To try to gauge the present competence of AI in storytelling, we asked two award-winning novelists to take on ChatGPT in writing flash fiction, giving the same instructions to bots and humans alike.

See if you can guess “who” wrote what.

Write a love story of up to 300 words, set in Taiwan, incorporating the words “mouldy” and “connection”.

An AI-generated image: “Noodlehead”. This image was produced by Bernard Cohen with the assistance of NightCafe.
An AI-generated image: “Noodlehead”. This image was produced by Bernard Cohen with the assistance of NightCafe.

Story One

No one goes to Taiwan to find love, although inevitably some stumble across it between plates of noodles.

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