Better than the mean human? The mean human creates far better stories while daydreaming. AI enthusiasts have such a distorted view of human capability, it’s bizarre.
The qualification "better" is doing some hefty lifting in your assumption.
What you think is better is not what I think is better. Imagination is not storytelling. You ask the "mean human" to write, it's going to be worse than an LLM in spelling and grammar, if you get anything at all.
Daydreaming is absolutely storytelling. The average person is able to craft elaborate stories on a whim. Writing is used, in part, for conveying stories, but writing is a separate skill. The good news is the average person can learn to write well, but LLMs, so far, have not demonstrated the ability to craft interesting stories and it’s pretty unlikely they’ll be able to learn, as this is an unverifiable domain.
The mean human gets a middling score in creative writing tasks at the end of their mandatory education, and most then leave school and forget what little they ever learned outside whatever their career path happened to be.
Most humans never do a creative writing course after school, and the longest fiction most people will write is their resume description of what their previous jobs involved, or perhaps their dating profile.
Don't mistake what you see published (or what your friends are like) for the average human: the average Hacker News comment easily above the writing grade (and creativity) of e.g. many of the one-shots stories I've seen attempted on some creative writing subreddits. "Mean" is not a high bar.
This should cause you to reconsider your beliefs leading up to it.
GPT-4 (!) has, in studies comparing multiple models with humans for creativity, beaten the mean human. In comparison, even just the mean of the top 50% of humans beat the models studied in that case (link follows), but the point is that if you think the mean humans is particularly noteworthy, you've avoided the half of the population who have the creativity of a pot noodle.
There's more studies out there with other types of creativity test, but the conclusion is basically the same: the best models beat the mean human, but are nowhere near as good the worst *publishable* human.
My guess is this is both why LLM slop happens and why it grates so hard: a significant number of bosses look at the output and think to themselves "wow so creative" because it's more creative than they themselves are; but those bosses weren't hired to be creative, they were hired to be a boss, and all the people who they hired to be creative are going "arg, no, can't you see how bad this is?"... but that is just a guess, I've not found any surveys comparing *management* creativity to LLMs, closest is e.g. this about decision making, not creativity: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5156585
