A full 15 years ago, a team of researchers from University College London and the University of Copenhagen put people into an fMRI machine and showed them a series of abstract images. They told them the images were either made by a human or by a computer. A clear winner emerged. People not only claimed to prefer the (identical) human-made pictures, their brains’ pleasure centers actually lit up more brightly. What the researchers didn’t anticipate, but which is likely to happen, is that this visceral preference for human over robot makers might grow stronger with time, just as technology closes the gap between them. Think of it as humanity’s collective defense mechanism.
Following up on this with something from Wired: