• by Ray Schultz , October 27, 2024

Readers say that well-crafted articles written in the traditional way are easier to understand than AI-generated stories, according to a new study. 

The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich surveyed more than 3,000 online news consumers in the UK. 

The respondents were asked to rate one of 24 texts, half produced with the help of automation and half manually written by journalists.

“Overall, readers found the 12 automated articles significantly less comprehensible,” says lead author Sina Thäsler-Kordonouri. 

The readers felt that the AI-written articles contained “inappropriate, difficult, or unusual words and phrases.” They also were dissatisfied with the handling of numbers and data. 

Thäsler-Kordonouri concludes, “Our results indicate the importance not only of maintaining human involvement in the automated production of data-driven news content, but of refining it.”