"Ronaldo's a poser!": How the Use of Generative AI Shapes Debates in Online Forums

TL;DR

This study explores how online forum participants use Generative AI like ChatGPT to craft arguments, often prompting aggressive responses and mimicking fallacious reasoning, revealing impacts on debate polarization.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into user behaviors and strategies when integrating GenAI into online debates, highlighting effects on discourse quality and polarization.

Findings

Participants prompted ChatGPT for aggressive responses.

Users created posts with similar content and logical fallacies.

Some users avoided ChatGPT to improve human-human communication.

Abstract

Online debates can enhance critical thinking but may escalate into hostile attacks. As humans are increasingly reliant on Generative AI (GenAI) in writing tasks, we need to understand how people utilize GenAI in online debates. To examine the patterns of writing behavior while making arguments with GenAI, we created an online forum for soccer fans to engage in turn-based and free debates in a post format with the assistance of ChatGPT, arguing on the topic of "Messi vs Ronaldo". After 13 sessions of two-part study and semi-structured interviews with 39 participants, we conducted content and thematic analyses to integrate insights from interview transcripts, ChatGPT records, and forum posts. We found that participants prompted ChatGPT for aggressive responses, created posts with similar content and logical fallacies, and sacrificed the use of ChatGPT for better human-human communication. This work uncovers how polarized forum members work with GenAI to engage in debates online.