Experiment design.

Academic research is not always available in a form that is accessible or engaging to a non-academic audience, hindering readers’ engagement with it. Non-academics, even if highly educated and policy experts in their fields, tend to need research to be presented in a more accessible way than peer-reviewed articles — one example being non-technical blogs. However, writing these requires some effort from researchers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can make academic research easier to understand by summarizing and simplifying academic papers much more quickly than researchers can, making it easier for researchers to produce such summaries. However, disclosure of AI use may lower readers’ perceived quality of and trust in the blog, generating a trade-off for the researcher. In this paper, we evaluate an 11-country experiment cross-randomizing a blog’s actual and reported author as AI or human. We find that research stakeholders rate the quality of AI-generated blogs marginally lower than human-written ones (p 0.1), but disclosure of AI use offsets the negative effect (p 0.1). The study sample consists of policy-relevant stakeholders who typically engage with academic research; they are highly educated and include thematic specialists. Indeed, findings indicate that this audience interprets “accessibility” differently, preferring slightly more technical summaries of research. The nature of the respondents may thus explain the particular findings in this study, suggesting that researchers should tailor their prompts for their intended audience. There are no effects on readers’ reported likelihood of engaging with the blog or on beliefs about others predicted engagement with it. Consequently, we hypothesize that researchers can leverage AI to communicate their research more easily without a penalty from disclosing its use.

学术研究往往并未采用非学术受众易于理解且能引发关注的呈现形式，这阻碍了非学术群体对研究内容的接触与参与。即便受过高等教育且身为所在领域的政策专家，非学术人士也通常需要研究以比同行评议论文更具易读性的方式呈现——非技术性博客便是典型一例。然而，撰写这类博客需要研究人员投入一定精力。人工智能（Artificial Intelligence, AI）工具能够以远快于研究人员的速度总结、简化学术论文，让学术研究更易于理解，同时降低了研究人员生成这类摘要的难度。不过，披露AI的使用情况可能会降低读者对该博客的感知质量与信任度，这给研究人员带来了权衡取舍的难题。本研究开展了一项覆盖11个国家的实验，对博客的实际作者与对外宣称的作者分别进行AI或人类的交叉随机分组处理。我们发现，研究利益相关者对AI生成博客的质量评分略低于人类撰写的博客（p=0.1），但披露AI使用情况可抵消这一负面影响（p=0.1）。本研究的样本为通常会接触学术研究的政策相关利益相关者，他们受教育程度较高，涵盖各主题领域的专家。事实上，研究结果显示，这类受众对“易读性”的解读存在差异，他们更偏好略微偏向技术性的研究摘要。因此，受访者的特征或许可以解释本研究的特定发现，这提示研究人员应当针对目标受众调整其提示词（prompt）。此外，披露AI使用情况并未对读者报告的参与该博客的可能性，或是对他人参与该博客的预期信念产生任何影响。据此，我们提出假设：研究人员可以借助AI更轻松地传播其研究成果，而不会因披露AI的使用而蒙受损失。