Most people can’t tell when a personal text message is written by AI. Here’s why it matters

Two new experiments show that most people do not even consider that a personal message could be AI -generated, even when they themselves use artificial intelligence to write. To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited than 1,300 U. S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life.