Julie BroadYour Non-Fiction Sidekick for Writing, Publishing & Marketing a Book That Builds Your Brand and Grows Your Biz

Can Readers Tell if Your Book Was Written by AI?

10 Sept 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:27

In this YouTube segment, Julie Broad presents findings from a study involving 1,682 readers who evaluated AI‑generated short stories. The AI stories received higher quality and absorption scores than human‑written ones, and participants correctly identified the source only 39% of the time—worse than random guessing. A follow‑up test showed that when readers were told a story was authored by a human, they rated it higher, indicating a bias toward perceived human authorship. Broad argues that while readers often cannot tell AI from human writing, they value the belief that a work is genuinely authored by a real person, which affects credibility and purchasing decisions. She concludes with practical advice for authors: write material only you can uniquely produce, and ensure it is clear and engaging enough for readers to finish and recommend.

Chapters

1,682 readers just rated AI-written stories better than human ones. The AI stories scored higher on quality. They scored higher on absorption, which is a fancy way of saying I couldn't put it down. When they were asked to pick, they got it right 39% of the time. That's not even half on a 2-option question. Flipping a coin, you might have done better. There's a couple things that my team has been talking about. One says, well, AI can't really write. Readers can tell and anyone with taste can tell, but the study really just refuted that. Now, the other camp of people said, great, readers can't tell, so AI can write the book. I'll save myself $20,000 and 6 months of pain. Both are reasonable-sounding arguments, but I don't think either are right. The researchers ran the same stories again, but this time they told people who wrote them. And when readers were told a story was written by a human, they rated it higher. Readers can't tell, but they pay for believing you are real. Your book has your name on it, your face on the back, your company, your clients, your reputation is all there in that book, and somebody is reading it deciding whether to hire you. Ultimately, my advice to you is write the book only you can write, and then write it clearly enough that somebody actually gets to the end so they can recommend it to other people.