The effect of source disclosure on evaluation of AI-generated messages: A two-part study

TL;DR

This research investigates how revealing the source of AI-generated versus human-generated messages affects people's evaluation and preference, revealing a slight bias against AI when its source is disclosed, especially among those with moderate negative attitudes.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence on the impact of source disclosure on perceptions of AI-generated messages in health communication, highlighting the moderating role of attitudes towards AI.

Findings

Source disclosure affects message evaluation but not ranking.

Negative attitudes towards AI influence message preference.

Disclosing AI as the source decreases preference among moderately negative attitudes.

Abstract

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last decade demonstrate that machines can exhibit communicative behavior and influence how humans think, feel, and behave. In fact, the recent development of ChatGPT has shown that large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to generate high-quality communication content at scale and across domains, suggesting that they will be increasingly used in practice. However, many questions remain about how knowing the source of the messages influences recipients' evaluation of and preference for AI-generated messages compared to human-generated messages. This paper investigated this topic in the context of vaping prevention messaging. In Study 1, which was pre-registered, we examined the influence of source disclosure on people's evaluation of AI-generated health prevention messages compared to human-generated messages. We found that source disclosure (i.e., labeling the source of a message as AI vs. human) significantly impacted the evaluation of the messages but did not significantly alter message rankings. In a follow-up study (Study 2), we examined how the influence of source disclosure may vary by the participants' negative attitudes towards AI. We found a significant moderating effect of negative attitudes towards AI on message evaluation, but not for message selection. However, for those with moderate levels of negative attitudes towards AI, source disclosure decreased the preference for AI-generated messages. Overall, the results of this series of studies showed a slight bias against AI-generated messages once the source was disclosed, adding to the emerging area of study that lies at the intersection of AI and communication.