The Reader is the Metric: How Textual Features and Reader Profiles Explain Conflicting Evaluations of AI Creative Writing

Recent studies comparing AI-generated and human-authored literary texts have produced conflicting results: some suggest AI already surpasses human quality, while others argue it still falls short.We start from the hypothesis that such divergences in literary evaluation are a meaningful signal.We posit that perceived "quality" is not a single, static property of a text, but emerges from the interaction between the text's features and the reader's own evaluative criteria.Using five public datasets (1,471 stories, 101 annotators including critics, students, and lay readers), we (i) extract 17 reference-less textual features (e.g., coherence, emotional variance, average sentence length...); (ii) model individual reader preferences, deriving feature importance vectors that reflect their textual priorities; and (iii) analyze these vectors in a shared "preference space".Reader vectors cluster into two profiles: surface-focused readers (mainly non-experts), who prioritize readability and textual richness; and holistic readers (mainly experts), who value thematic development, rhetorical variety, and sentiment dynamics.Our results quantitatively explain how measurements of literary quality are a function of how text features align with each reader's preferences.These findings advocate for reader-sensitive evaluation frameworks in the field of creative text generation. 1