AI vs. Professional Authors Results

Summary

Before you look at the results make sure to do the test!So, before I get to the numbers and reveals I'll reiterate a few things:i) I hate that AI can do this.ii) These authors write books - typically long series - so flash fiction is not their forte.iii) Flash fiction is where AI does best - it starts to fall apart as the required work gets longer.Some have questioned "why flash fiction"...Answer: because you test things at breaking point. If I'm interested in what it takes to smash a window I don't throw 8 anvils at 8 windows and 8 ping-pong balls at 8 windows and say, "Welp, there you have it, anvils are 100% better than ping-pong balls." In the first blog post 2 years ago the performance of the authors and AI overlapped but the authors did better on the whole. So my guess was correct, this is where the AI performance starts to falter.In the second blog post we revist to see what has changed with 2 years development. I found the results interesting.If I could have got a meaningful number of people to read 8 twenty-thousand-word novellas (I couldn't) and I could convince busy authors to write novellas for an experiment (I couldn't) then we would clearly get a 100% result in favour of the humans ... and ... have learned very little about the state of play.The contributing authors have sold around 15 millions books between them. And they are...Robin HobbJanny WurtsChristian Cameron / Miles Cameron& me!In terms of ratings - when we did this 2 years ago, the scores were low. Six of the eight entries scored 3* or less. The people I can attract to vote in this like to read books. Short stories are unpopular in comparison, and the shorter they get the harder it is to tell a good tale. The ungenerous will suggest it is simply because none of the entries were great - I feel it's because book readers rate short stories lower than books.Two years later, five of the eight entries scored 3* or above. You can consider the results below to see if that was because the humans did b...