Trust in AI-Generated Scientific Evidence: A Pilot Study

Recent research has shown that message credibility is reduced when the respective message was generated by artificial intelligence (AI). However, it is currently unknown whether this is also true for scientific research. Considering that researchers increasingly use AI in their work, I examine whether scientific evidence generated with the help of AI is trusted less compared to scientific evidence generated without AI use. The present study is a pilot study which will pretest vignette-based experimental materials consisting of combinations of author and study descriptions. The descriptions will be experimentally varied regarding the degree of AI use by the respective authors and in the respective studies. As dependent variable, we use a manipulation check variable on the perceived degree of AI use (1) in the respective studies, and (2) by the respective authors. unknown other