Readers appear to prefer words written by a robot rather than a human

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Thousands of authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Malorie Blackman, have published a blank book to protest against AI models being trained on their work without permission or payment. The timing is apt, because of a New York Times quiz that suggests that fears around the march of generative writing are legitimate. The quiz, published on Monday, asks readers to choose between two passages, one written by a successful author and the other by AI. Across the categories of literary fiction, fantasy, science and poetry, the readers preferred the computer. Only in historical fiction and poetry did they opt for the human.