Can you spot AI-written stories? Listen and find out

2026-08-12 · 12 min · episode 1533 · 13 entities

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Entities found in this episode

concepts 11

mentioned Science concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Science
mentioned Life Sciences concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Life Sciences
mentioned Daily News concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Daily News
mentioned Nature concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Nature
mentioned Astronomy concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Astronomy
discusses News concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: News
discusses Science concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Science
discusses Life Sciences concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Life Sciences
discusses Daily News concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Daily News
discusses Nature concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Nature
discusses Astronomy concept

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evidence rules-v5
Feed category: Astronomy

companys 2

mentioned NPR company

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evidence rules-v5
Feed author/publisher: NPR
hosted by NPR company

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evidence rules-v5
Feed author/publisher: NPR

Episode description as stored

Can you tell the difference between a human-written short story and an AI-generated one? Most people can’t. In a series of experiments led by a team at Villanova University, researchers found two things: First, most people said they preferred human written stories, but couldn’t tell the difference between AI and human writing; and second, when presented with two similar short stories, one written by a human and one generated by AI, readers tended to prefer the AI-generated piece – especially if they had been told the AI story was written by a human. We excerpted two of the short stories on our website for you to guess which is AI-generated and which is human-generated. Check out the full set of stories here . Interested in more science and technology news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org . Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy