Readers cannot reliably distinguish short stories written by humans from those produced by a chatbot, and tend to rate the machine-made versions as better writing, according to research published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. The three-part study by Sydney Sears and Deena Skolnick Weisberg of Villanova University set six pieces of short fiction against one another: three published works by human authors and three counterparts commissioned from ChatGPT on matching themes. The human material included FISH by Emilie Fox, published in Longleaf Review in 2021; High Heels by Susie Maguire, from her 2000 collection The Short Hello; and Inisfree by Patrick Smyth, from Whipping the Cat: Tales from Lough Neagh's Banks, published in 1993. The researchers prompted ChatGPT 4.0 to produce stories of roughly 1,000 words on the same subject matter. In the first experiment, 1,682 adults recruited through Prolific were each given a single story, with half misled about who had written it. Stories actually produced by the chatbot scored higher on both absorption and perceived quality, regardless of the label attached. At the same time, participants marked work down when told a machine wrote it. The effect was not uniform: those with warmer attitudes towards technology gave particularly generous ratings when told a story was ChatGPT's work. Weisberg argued the findings should prompt a revision of assumptions, while insisting this does not settle who ought to be writing. The second and