Materials for: Human Heuristics for AI-Generated Language Are Flawed

Human communication is increasingly intermixed with language generated by AI. Across chat, email, and social media, AI systems produce smart replies, autocompletes, and translations. AI-generated language is often not identified as such but presented as language written by humans, raising concerns about novel forms of deception and manipulation. Here, we study how humans discern whether verbal self-presentations, one of the most personal and consequential forms of language, were generated by AI. In six experiments, participants (N = 4,600) were unable to detect self-presentations generated by state-of-the-art AI language models in professional, hospitality, and dating contexts. A computational analysis of language features shows that human judgments of AI-generated language are handicapped by intuitive but flawed heuristics such as associating first-person pronouns, spontaneous wording, or family topics with human-written language. We experimentally demonstrate that these heuristics make human judgment of AI-generated language predictable and manipulable, allowing AI systems to produce language perceived as more human than human. We discuss solutions, such as AI accents, to reduce the deceptive potential of language generated by AI, limiting the subversion of human intuition.

The texts of human-written (ie., non-generated) self-presentations were redacted from the repository for privacy and legal reasons. Please refer to the manuscript for reproduction of the data. If you wish further information to be removed from the repository, kindly contact the corresponding author listed in the manuscript.

人类交流日益与人工智能生成的语言交织在一起。在聊天、电子邮件和社交媒体中，人工智能系统产生了智能回复、自动完成和翻译。人工智能生成的语言往往不被识别为人工智能生成的，而是以人类撰写的语言形式呈现，引发了关于新型欺骗和操纵形式的问题。在本研究中，我们探讨了人类如何辨别口头自我介绍是否由人工智能生成，口头自我介绍是最具个人色彩和后果的语言形式之一。在六项实验中，参与者（N = 4,600）无法在专业、酒店和约会场景中检测到由最先进的AI语言模型生成的自我介绍。对语言特征的计算机分析表明，人类对人工智能生成语言的判断受到直觉但存在缺陷的启发式方法的影响，例如将第一人称代词、自发措辞或家庭话题与人类撰写的语言联系起来。我们通过实验证明了这些启发式方法使得人类对人工智能生成语言的判断变得可预测和可操纵，使得人工智能系统能够生成被认为比人类语言更接近人类语言的语言。我们讨论了如AI口音等解决方案，以减少人工智能生成语言的欺骗潜力，限制对人类直觉的颠覆。出于隐私和法律原因，人类撰写的（即非生成性）自我介绍文本已从存储库中删除。请参阅手稿以获取数据的复制信息。如需从存储库中删除更多信息，请联系手稿中列出的对应作者。