Perceptions of Human and Machine-Generated Articles

Automated journalism technology is transforming news production and changing how audiences perceive the news. As automated text-generation models advance, it is important to understand how readers perceive human-written and machine-generated content. This study used OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generation model (May 2019 release) and articles from news organizations across the political spectrum to study participants’ reactions to human- and machine-generated articles. As participants read the articles, we collected their facial expression and galvanic skin response (GSR) data together with self-reported perceptions of article source and content credibility. We also asked participants to identify their political affinity and assess the articles’ political tone to gain insight into the relationship between political leaning and article perception. Our results indicate that the May 2019 release of OpenAI’s GPT-2 model generated articles that were misidentified as written by a human close to half the time, while human-written articles were identified correctly as written by a human about 70 percent of the time.