The Effects of Perceived AI Use On Content Perceptions
Abstract
There is a potential future where the content created by a human and an AI are indistinguishable. In this future, if you can’t tell the difference, does it matter? We conducted a 3 (Assigned creator: human, human with AI assistance, AI) by 4 (Context: news, travel, health, and jokes) mixed-design experiment where participants evaluated human-written content that was presented as created by a human, a human with AI assistance, or an AI. We found that participants felt more negatively about the content creator and were less satisfied when they thought AI was used, but assigned creator had no effect on content judgments. We also identified five interpretations for how participants thought AI use affected the content creation process. Our work suggests that informing users about AI use may not have the intended effect of helping consumers make content judgments and may instead damage the relationship between creators and followers.
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We used the within-subject study design and randomized the alt text presentation sequence to avoid ordering bias that can occur while evaluating text written by AI or humans.
“We used the within-subject study design and randomized the alt text presentation sequence to avoid ordering bias that can occur while evaluating text written by AI or humans [62].”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [62]
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“In the following sections, we describe the user study and the findings from it.”
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- Authors
- Rae, I.
- Affiliations
- Google (United States) (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rae, Irene
- ORCID
- Rae, Irene
- Venue
- Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-05-11
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W4396833212
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 7
- FWCI
- 19.16
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Keywords
- AI-generated content, content satisfaction, human-AI collaboration, content perception, user perceptions of AI, AI disclosure
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