When AI companions become witty: Can human brain recognize AI-generated irony?

TL;DR

This study explores whether humans recognize AI-generated irony as intentional, revealing that people attribute less intentionality to AI, affecting neural responses and highlighting the importance of perceived sincerity in social interactions with AI.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into how humans attribute mental states to AI during irony comprehension, combining behavioral and neural evidence to show reduced intentional stance towards AI.

Findings

Participants attributed less intentionality to AI irony than human irony.

Neural responses (P200 and P600) were attenuated for AI-generated irony.

Perceived sincerity of AI increased neural markers of intentionality.

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as social agents and trained to produce humor and irony, a question emerges: when encountering witty AI remarks, do people interpret these as intentional communication or mere computational output? This study investigates whether people adopt the intentional stance, attributing mental states to explain behavior,toward AI during irony comprehension. Irony provides an ideal paradigm because it requires distinguishing intentional contradictions from unintended errors through effortful semantic reanalysis. We compared behavioral and neural responses to ironic statements from AI versus human sources using established ERP components: P200 reflecting early incongruity detection and P600 indexing cognitive efforts in reinterpreting incongruity as deliberate irony. Results demonstrate that people do not fully adopt the intentional stance toward AI-generated irony. Behaviorally, participants attributed incongruity to deliberate communication for both sources, though significantly less for AI than human, showing greater tendency to interpret AI incongruities as computational errors. Neural data revealed attenuated P200 and P600 effects for AI-generated irony, suggesting reduced effortful detection and reanalysis consistent with diminished attribution of communicative intent. Notably, people who perceived AI as more sincere showed larger P200 and P600 effects for AI-generated irony, suggesting that intentional stance adoption is calibrated by specific mental models of artificial agents. These findings reveal that source attribution shapes neural processing of social-communicative phenomena. Despite current LLMs' linguistic sophistication, achieving genuine social agency requires more than linguistic competence, it necessitates a shift in how humans perceive and attribute intentionality to artificial agents.