Assessing the Human Likeness of AI-Generated Counterspeech

Xiaoying Song, Sujana Mamidisetty, Eduardo Blanco, Lingzi Hong


Abstract
Counterspeech is a targeted response to counteract and challenge abusive or hateful content. It effectively curbs the spread of hatred and fosters constructive online communication. Previous studies have proposed different strategies for automatically generated counterspeech. Evaluations, however, focus on relevance, surface form, and other shallow linguistic characteristics. This paper investigates the human likeness of AI-generated counterspeech, a critical factor influencing effectiveness. We implement and evaluate several LLM-based generation strategies, and discover that AI-generated and human-written counterspeech can be easily distinguished by both simple classifiers and humans. Further, we reveal differences in linguistic characteristics, politeness, and specificity. The dataset used in this study is publicly available for further research.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.239
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3547–3559
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.239/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoying Song, Sujana Mamidisetty, Eduardo Blanco, and Lingzi Hong. 2025. Assessing the Human Likeness of AI-Generated Counterspeech. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3547–3559, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Human Likeness of AI-Generated Counterspeech (Song et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.239.pdf