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Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
(daringfireball.net)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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There was a recent study that showed that people preferred AI writing to human writing.
The gist of the study is they took published short stories and prompted AI to write a comparable short story. They then presented the stories to a group of people, sometimes telling them which were AI written and which weren't, but sometimes they intentionally lied and said the human-written story was AI written and vice versa.
People prefer AI written stories, and unsurprising, if they have a negative view of AI, they'll rate stories they think are AI as worse, even when it's not actually written by AI.
They also performed a test to see if people could differentiate between AI and human stories, and people could only tell ~45% to 50% of the time. Essentially a guess.
Now, being better at writing short stories doesn't necessarily mean better at all forms of writing, but I think people who aren't using AI have a mental snapshot of the capabilities of AI at some point in the past and assume AI hasn't improved further since that mental snapshot was taken.
Yes, people in general prefer bland and easy to follow stories. I would bet the majority of participants in the study don't normally read short stories since moat people don't read for enjoyment. Blockbusters and the vast majority of popular movies follow predictable story beats in a clear and accessible way. Same is true for books.
AI is the McDonald's of writing and that isn't a point in its favor unless all we care about is mass consumption of regurgitated and reworded stories humans wrote originally.
When confronted with data that people preferred AI writing to human writing, your reaction is to make something up about the participants? Wild.
Even if I accept that people just want to read garbage and they wouldn't know "good" writing if they saw it, so what? How does that affect anything we're discussing?
There is nothing wrong with their guess. The paper you linked says nearly the same thing:
Being easier to read and understand is a sign of good writing, and being easy to follow and read does not mean something is "bland".
The fact of the matter is that we have evidence that AI can write in such a way that the writing is judged better than human writing, as judged by humans. Dismissing the study by "betting" that the study participants didn't like to read is unscientific nonsense, in no way comparable to what you quoted. That's a person being confronted with facts that contradict their current beliefs and rejecting facts to maintain those beliefs.
Personally, I don't even understand the point in refusing to believe that AI can be better at humans at some tasks. What is gained by maintaining that belief?