Study Says Readers Distrust AI News

A new study has determined that readers have less trust in news credibility when they find out that artificial intelligence has been used in some way to generate an article. Researchers from the University of Kansas posit that understanding how and what technology contributed to news as well as how this could be revealed to readers in a way they understood needed to be resolved.

The study was led by Associate professor Alyssa Appelman and Assistant Professor Steve Bien-Aimé who conducted an experiment where they showed readers a news story about aspartame and how safe it was for human consumption.

The researchers randomly assigned 1 of 5 bylines; written by AI, written by staff writer, written by staff writer with AI collaboration, written by staff writer with AI assistance and written by staff writer with AI tool, to the articles. Apart from this, the article was the same in all cases.

They reported their findings in a pair of research papers, both of which were written by Bien-Aimé and Appelman, along with Mu Wu of California State University, Los Angeles and Haiyan Jia of Lehigh University.

One paper centered on how readers understood artificial intelligence bylines. Readers were polled after reading the articles about what a particular byline they got meant and if they agreed with statements that measured their attitudes and media literacy towards artificial intelligence. A majority admitted that they felt people were the main contributors, while some reported they thought artificial intelligence may have been used in writing a draft edited by a person or in research assistance.

These findings were reported in the Communication Reports journal.

The second paper investigated how perceiving humanness mediated the association between credibility judgments and the perceived contribution of artificial intelligence. The investigators determined that acknowledging artificial intelligence use improved transparency, and readers felt that individual contribution to news enhanced trustworthiness.

Participants also declared what percentage they thought artificial intelligence was involved in article generation, regardless of the byline. The investigators found that the higher the percentage given, the lower their judgment of the article’s credibility. Even individuals who read articles that had the byline ‘written by staff writer’ admitted that they felt artificial intelligence was involved to some extent.

The paper’s findings suggest that individuals give higher credibility to contributions in fields that have traditionally been occupied by humans. Replacing these efforts with technology like artificial intelligence impacts how credibility is perceived. These findings were reported in the Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans journal.

With tech giants like NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) ramping up their production of the AI chips used to program large language models powering AI systems, it is likely that the glitches which have caused consumers of news to distrust AI use will be fixed and the credibility of AI-generated news will grow.

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