I can tell. JDA can tell. But unless you are already an AI-adept professional author who is actively utilizing the latest technologies, you are demonstrably unable to distinguish between AI-generated text and texts written by accomplished, bestselling writers:
Mark Lawrence is a very successful fantasy writer. His PRINCE OF THORNS has sold more than one million copies. He is one of the many professional authors who, while disdaining the use of textual AI, is concerned about its eventual impact on his profession. He recently conducted a very interesting experiment in which he and three other very well-established professional authors wrote short stories on the same subject, and ChatGPT 5 was prompted for four short stories on the same subject.
You can read all eight stories here and see for yourself if you can tell which stories are human-written and which are AI-generated. You don’t need to vote, and you’ll have to keep track of what you thought of each story yourself.
A statistically-significant number of 964 people, who, being fans of Lawrence are much more literate on average than the norm, read the stories and rated them. The results are intriguing and will probably surprise most people who don’t read here regularly. On average, the readers were able to correctly identify the provenance of 3 out of the 8 stories. Not only that, but the story they rated the highest, and 3 out of the 4 highest-rated stories, were all AI-generated.
Read the whole thing at AI Central. And the next time you see someone going on about “AI slop” or how AI just can’t produce the same emotions and feelings that humans can, you’ll know that they’re just posturing in obvious ignorance.
The ironic thing is that AI is actually going to improve the level of writing, because most books are very mediocre and AI is already better than that.