Grapevine

By Phys
Oct 5, 2024

Study finds people are skeptical of headlines labeled as AI-generated

News consumers are averse to AI-generated headlines, which are seen as potentially inaccurate. AI-generated content is proliferating online, and social media companies have started to label it.

Sacha Altay and Fabrizio Gilardi conducted two preregistered online experiments among 4,976 US and UK participants to investigate the effect of labeling headlines as AI. The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

Respondents rated 16 headlines that were either true, false, AI- or human-generated.

In Study 1, participants were randomly assigned to conditions in which (i) no headline was labeled as AI, (ii) AI-generated headlines were labeled as AI, (iii) human-generated headlines were labeled as AI, and (iv) false headlines were labeled as false.