Data2Story converts CSVs to articles with 7 AI; 53...

For images, video, and audio, the system pulls in OpenRouter models like gpt-5.4-image-2, seedance-2.0, and lyria-3-pro-preview. 53 readers rate agent articles higher than human originals The researchers paired 18 public datasets with matching human-written originals from three distinct sources. They used the concise briefings from The Economist, the lavishly designed long reads from The Pudding, and the community datasets from TidyTuesday.

53 recruited readers rated both versions across five categories, including visual design, narrative rhythm, data transparency, verifiability of claims, and insight gained. The biggest lead was in transparency, at +1.49 on a seven-point scale. Overall, 74 percent preferred the agent article, 25 percent the human version, and 2 percent called it a draw.

The agent won clearly in data-heavy Economist briefings and TidyTuesday pieces. Against Pudding reports, which design teams often spend weeks crafting, it was a statistical tie. When measuring which statements from the human-written article also appear in the agent-generated article, Data2Story covers about half.

Conversely, only 35 percent of the agent's statements are found in the human text. The agent adds plenty of its own angles but only partly captures the editorial core. The gap is widest in short, formulaic Economist briefings, where the agent reproduces 73 percent of human findings, likely because those texts hew closely to standard statistics the agent calculates anyway.

Where humans still win The researchers flag three areas where human authors stay ahead. On editorial perspective, reporters explain things the data can't.