How Does the Disclosure of AI Assistance Affect the Perceptions of Writing?

Zhuoyan Li, Chen Liang, Jing Peng, Ming Yin


Abstract
Recent advances in generative AI technologies like large language models have boosted the incorporation of AI assistance in writing workflows, leading to the rise of a new paradigm of human-AI co-creation in writing. To understand how people perceive writings that are produced under this paradigm, in this paper, we conduct an experimental study to understand whether and how the disclosure of the level and type of AI assistance in the writing process would affect people’s perceptions of the writing on various aspects, including their evaluation on the quality of the writing, and their ranking of different writings. Our results suggest that disclosing the AI assistance in the writing process, especially if AI has provided assistance in generating new content, decreases the average quality ratings for both argumentative essays and creative stories. This decrease in the average quality ratings often comes with an increased level of variations in different individuals’ quality evaluations of the same writing. Indeed, factors such as an individual’s writing confidence and familiarity with AI writing assistants are shown to moderate the impact of AI assistance disclosure on their writing quality evaluations. We also find that disclosing the use of AI assistance may significantly reduce the proportion of writings produced with AI’s content generation assistance among the top-ranked writings.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.279
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4849–4868
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.279
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.279
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuoyan Li, Chen Liang, Jing Peng, and Ming Yin. 2024. How Does the Disclosure of AI Assistance Affect the Perceptions of Writing?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4849–4868, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Does the Disclosure of AI Assistance Affect the Perceptions of Writing? (Li et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.279.pdf