Once Upon a Time, there was an Algorithm– A Comparative Reception Study of AI-Generated and Human-Written Fairy-Tale Texts about Mermaids

This study investigates the reception of fairy-tale text excerpts that were either written by a generative AI (GPT-4) or by human authors. It focuses on whether and in what way readers perceive the selected excerpts as literary, emotional, and fairy-tale-like, and whether knowledge about the authorship (AI vs. human) influences these evaluations, which are made along literature-based dimensions. The material consists of excerpts from classical and AI-generated mermaid fairy tales. The study uses a comparative design with two randomly assigned groups and aims to identify differences in the perception of literary quality between these groups. Data are collected via an online survey with a standardized questionnaire and are complemented by a computational linguistic analysis of textual features.