News from Generative Artificial Intelligence Is Believed Less

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can generate text virtually indistinguishable from text written by humans. A key question, then, is whether people believe news headlines generated by AI as much as news headlines generated by humans. AI is viewed as lacking human motives and emotions, suggesting that people might view news written by AI as more accurate. By contrast, two pre-registered experiments on representative U.S. samples (N = 4, 034) showed that people rated news headlines written by AI as less accurate than those written by humans. People were more likely to incorrectly rate news headlines written by AI (vs. a human) as inaccurate when they were actually true, and more likely to correctly rate them as inaccurate when they were indeed false. Our findings are important given the increasing adoption of AI in news generation, and the associated ethical and governance pressures to disclose it use and address standards of transparency and accountability.