"The growing concentration of AI in journalism is a question we know journalists and educators are talking about, but we were interested in how readers are perceiving it. So we wanted to know more about media byline perceptions and their influence, or what people think about news generated by AI," said co-author of the study, Alyssa Appelman, associate professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, in a press release.
For the study, the researchers recruited 269 participants and asked them to read one of five versions of a news article entitled ‘Soda Sweetener Aspartame Now Listed as Possible Cancer Cause. But It's Still Considered Safe’, which was adapted from an article written by two reporters at the Associated Press. While the news content was the same in the five versions of the stimuli, each had a different byline suggesting different levels of AI contribution from ‘written by a staff writer’ to ‘written by a staff writer with AI assistance’ to ‘written with AI.’
Ultimately, the researchers found that mention of AI contribution in the byline negatively affected perceptions of source and author credibility. They even found that the byline ‘written by a staff writer’ was interpreted as meaning at least partially written by an AI due to a lack of visible human authorship.
In a second study, the same researchers investigated how 'humanness perceptions' affected the relationship between perceived AI contribution and credibility judgments. They found that the more readers thought AI was involved in an article, the less credible they thought it was.
The researchers noted, however, that acknowledging an AI improved transparency and that readers thought that human contribution improved news trustworthiness.
"The big thing was not between whether it was AI or human: It was how much work they thought the human did. This shows we need to be clear. We think journalists have a lot of assumptions that we make in our field that consumers know what we do. They often do not,” said Steve Bien-Aimé, assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, in a press release.
"Part of our research framework has always been assessing if readers know what journalists do. And we want to continue to better understand how people view the work of journalists,” he added.
Sources: Science Daily, Computers in Human BehaviorL Artificial Humans, Communication Reports