Can AI tell good stories? Narrative Transportation and Persuasion with ChatGPT

Storytelling is a human universal, but can Artificial Intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT tell a good story? Based on three pre-registered experiments, we investigated if narratives generated by ChatGPT or human lead to different levels of transportation, counterarguing, psychological reactance, self-referencing, and story-consistent attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Drawing on narratives examined in existing research, we crafted three narratives of comparable length and content using ChatGPT and labeled them alongside human-authored narratives as either human or AI-generated. Our findings indicate that labeling a narrative as AI-generated led to lower transportation, higher counterarguing, and lower story-consistent beliefs. However, AI-generated narratives surpassed their human-generated counterparts in reducing counterarguing and promoting story-consistent attitudes and behavioral intention, except when adapting pre-existing stories. We conclude that public skepticism towards AI persists, but language models such as ChatGPT hold the potential to outperform human writers, particularly when provided with fewer instructions.