Research indicates that news articles generated by artificial intelligence lack the distinctive creative touch found in pieces penned by human reporters when comparing their narrative styles.
Researchers from Charles Darwin University (CDU) aimed to identify the linguistic differences between news articles written by journalists and those generated by artificial intelligence. paper The article "Distinguishing Human Journalists from Artificial Storytellers Through Stylistic Fingerprints" appeared in Emerging Trends in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, which is a special edition of the journal. Computers .
Scientists inputted 150 news pieces covering areas like politics, athletics, defense matters, and tech into the chatbot named Gemini, asking it to generate 150 corresponding articles consistent with the essence of the original human-authored texts.
The narratives crafted by humans were obtained from The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian.
Van Hieu Tran, a CDU Master of Information Technology graduate and the primary researcher for this study, noted that although AI-created content improves daily, there remain slight but noticeable distinctions in style.
The research revealed that human journalists exhibit more diversity in sentence and paragraph lengths, whereas Gemini showed limited variation in syntactical structure.
Human journalists tend to incorporate a higher number of verbs, indicating that their writing style emphasizes describing actions to captivate readers. In contrast, Gemini employs a greater quantity of nouns relative to verbs.
"The research we've presented indicates that both AI-generated and human-written content have similar levels of readability," Tran stated.
The study also reveals that human authors generate a wider range of sentence structures and paragraphs in their journalism compared to AI. Artificial intelligence tends to create content that is perceived as 'less interesting,' lacking both stylistic variety and the distinctive touch of individual writers.
Dr. Yakub Sebastian, a lecturer in Information Technology at CDU, emphasizes that this study is significant as it indicates that human creativity and profound character traits might continue to flourish, thereby becoming increasingly engaging for human audiences.
Additionally, there is a more profound inquiry into whether it makes a difference if we can differentiate between AI and human authors beyond concerns related to authorship and originality, particularly when all factual information in the news remains equally precise.
I believe it's important because news frequently influences perspectives and stories, beyond merely presenting information. For example, AI biases are definitely something we should worry about.
Dr. Sebastian, who led the study and contributed to writing the published report, emphasized the significance of such research considering the rapid advancement of AI technology towards mimicking human-generated content. He also noted that insights derived from their work might find real-world uses.
"As AI models progress at an astonishing pace, we observe their growing ability to perform tasks that were once solely within human capabilities," stated Dr. Sebastian.
Consequently, we can anticipate that differentiating between texts created by humans and those generated by artificial intelligence will grow progressively more challenging for human readers. This trend is currently underway. Not long ago, an Italian news outlet released what was officially recognized as the world’s first AI-produced newspaper.
Imagine a web browser extension similar to Turnitin that could determine with some level of certainty whether the content displayed on the webpage is AI-generated, using the machine learning model we devised in this research.
More information: Van Hieu Tran et al., Identifying Human Journalists From AI Narrative Creators Via Linguistic Signatures Computers (2024). DOI: 10.3390/computers13120328
Supplied by Charles Darwin University
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