This paper examines how individuals perceive the credibility of content originating from human authors versus content generated by large language models, like the GPT language model family that powers ChatGPT, in different user interface versions. Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that regardless of the user interface presentation, participants tend to attribute similar levels of credibility. While participants also do not report any different perceptions of competence and trustworthiness between human and AI-generated content, they rate AI-generated content as being clearer and more engaging. The findings from this study serve as a call for a more discerning approach to evaluating information sources, encouraging users to exercise caution and critical thinking when engaging with content generated by AI systems.

This study examined young people’s trust of Wikipedia as an information resource. A large-scale probability-based survey with embedded quasi-experiments was conducted with 2,747 children in the U.S. ranging from 11 to 18 years old. Results show that young people find Wikipedia to be fairly credible, but also exhibit an awareness of potential problems with non-expert, user-generated content in anonymous environments. Children tend to evaluate the credibility of online encyclopedia information with this in mind, at times with what appears to be an unwarranted devaluation of this information.