Bestselling fantasy author Mark Lawrence asked three established fantasy authors to write 350-word short stories along with him and let his blog readers compare them to four similar stories produced by ChatGPT. He ran this experiment two years ago and concluded Team Human still had the edge. This year, not so much.

Read the eight stories here and keep your own tally on whether a story is written by AI or author and what rating you would give it out of five stars.

I read through them today and had hoped for better results at picking out the AI writing. I picked half of them correctly: two human written, two AI. I didn’t score the stories high in general, giving only one five stars and another four. Three I gave three stars. The remaining three earned twos and a one. It’s a little embarrassing to say my two high ranking stories were AI written. Two of the ones I disliked the most were manmade.

Jon Del Arroz, another fantasy author, reacts to the poll in this video.