AI or human: writing passages

We are approaching a point (or we’re here already) where generated output is not much different from human-made things. So instead of deciphering what is fake and real, we might be asking which is better. For the New York Times, Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson have a quiz that asks which writing passage reads better to you.

These are isolated, short passages that don’t require sustained coherence, so it’s hard to tell the difference in the examples. Longer passages or articles would probably favor human writers, for now. I am curious if a decade from now, in search of human life, we seek craggly imperfections as a signal for a real brain and beating heart.