Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that while artificial intelligence can spin increasingly convincing stories, its characters may still lack one of the qualities that make human-written fiction memorable: mystery.

As AI writing tools become more common in publishing and entertainment, Carolina researchers wanted to understand whether the characters created by these systems are as varied and nuanced as those crafted by human authors. Their findings suggest that, despite advances in technology, AI still tends to rely on familiar patterns.

The study examined how characters in stories generated by AI compare with those written by people. Drawing on ideas from literary theory, the researchers analyzed eight different aspects of character portrayal, including whether characters seem realistic or exaggerated, whether they evolve over time, and whether they remain mysterious or fully understood by the end of a story.