2 min readAug 13, 2026 06:05 AM IST First published on: Aug 13, 2026 at 06:05 AM ISTIt was, so the literary rumour mill goes, a lunch wager that led Ernest Hemingway to come up with what is said to be the world’s shortest short story: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn”. Hemingway may or may not have written it, but the shortest horror story, most certainly written by American science fiction writer Fredric Brown in 1948, is marginally more expansive: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” Would either of these have stood a chance if they had been written in this age of AI? A new multi-university study, published in the journal, Judgment and Decision Making, seems to indicate the competition would have been tough.For the study, readers were given six short stories — three by humans and three generated by ChatGPT — with each AI-generated story similar in theme to the human one. Participants were told whether they were reading a human- or AI-written story, though this information was not always accurate, and asked to rate them on the basis of how engaging the stories were. The AI-generated stories received higher ratings.AdvertisementThe result, though, should not come as a surprise. In May this year, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize faced a controversy when one of its regional winners was accused of using AI to generate his story. Granta eventually withheld publication, but questions over authenticity, over what masquerades as human experience, have become more urgent than ever. After all, to write is to leave a trace of oneself in the world, against time, against fear, against vanity, memory, and mortality. It is, like life, at once ordinary and momentous, imperfect and still full of small miracles. Could LLMs ever better that?