Penalizing Transparency? How AI Disclosure and Author Demographics Shape Human and AI Judgments About Writing

TL;DR

This study examines how AI disclosure and author demographics influence perceptions of writing quality, revealing that disclosure penalizes AI use and interacts with author identity differently for humans and LLMs.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of AI transparency and demonstrates demographic biases in AI and human evaluations of writing.

Findings

Both human and LLM raters penalize AI disclosure.

LLM raters favor women and Black authors without disclosure.

Disparities in evaluation patterns between humans and LLMs.

Abstract

As AI integrates in various types of human writing, calls for transparency around AI assistance are growing. However, if transparency operates on uneven ground and certain identity groups bear a heavier cost for being honest, then the burden of openness becomes asymmetrical. This study investigates how AI disclosure statement affects perceptions of writing quality, and whether these effects vary by the author's race and gender. Through a large-scale controlled experiment, both human raters (n = 1,970) and LLM raters (n = 2,520) evaluated a single human-written news article while disclosure statements and author demographics were systematically varied. This approach reflects how both human and algorithmic decisions now influence access to opportunities (e.g., hiring, promotion) and social recognition (e.g., content recommendation algorithms). We find that both human and LLM raters consistently penalize disclosed AI use. However, only LLM raters exhibit demographic interaction effects: they favor articles attributed to women or Black authors when no disclosure is present. But these advantages disappear when AI assistance is revealed. These findings illuminate the complex relationships between AI disclosure and author identity, highlighting disparities between machine and human evaluation patterns.