Willingness to Read AI-Generated News Is Not Driven by Their Perceived Quality
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Abstract
The advancement of artificial intelligence has led to its application in many areas, including news media, which makes it crucial to understand public reception of AI-generated news. This preregistered study investigates (i) the perceived quality of AI-assisted and AI-generated versus human-generated news articles, (ii) whether disclosure of AI's involvement in generating these news articles influences engagement with them, and (iii) whether such awareness affects the willingness to read AI-generated articles in the future. We conducted a survey experiment with 599 Swiss participants, who evaluated the credibility, readability, and expertise of news articles either written by journalists (control group), rewritten by AI (AI-assisted group), or entirely written by AI (AI-generated group). Our results indicate that all articles were perceived to be of equal quality. When participants in the treatment groups were subsequently made aware of AI's role, they expressed a higher willingness to continue reading the articles than participants in the control group. However, they were not more willing to read AI-generated news in the future. These results suggest that aversion to AI usage in news media is not primarily rooted in a perceived lack of quality, and that by disclosing using AI, journalists could induce more short-term engagement.
