People cannot reliably recall whether or not they used artificial intelligence to create a text after as little as one week, according to a new study.
The research, carried out at Germany's University of Bayreuth and Finland's Aalto University in Helsinki, raises the concern that students, employees and authors are likely to unwittingly pass off AI-generated text as their own original writing and ideas.
The study found that asking people to recall AI involvement in content creation after the fact is unlikely to produce accurate results, with the probability of correct recall dropping sharply within seven days.
“Workflows in which human and artificial intelligence were combined were particularly prone to errors — that is, when the idea came from AI but the formulation was done by the human, and vice versa,” said Daniel Buschek, a professor in the field of mobile user interfaces at the University of Bayreuth.
When a person had written up an idea that was originally generated by AI, the probability of correctly remembering how the content came about dropped to 37.7% after seven days.
Conversely, when a person had their own idea written up by an AI, there was a 64% chance of correctly identifying the idea as their own after one week.
Two risks from memory gaps around AI use
Based on these findings, the researchers identified two risks arising from memory gaps in the use of AI:
- People may claim AI-generated ideas and writing as their own.
- Conversely, people may underestimate their own contribution, incorrectly remembering their own idea as AI-generated.
The researchers say it is therefore unrealistic to rely on a person to recall their use of AI based on memory alone and propose that a more practical approach would be to document the creation of content from the outset.
The study, published in April, involved 184 participants who took part in an experiment in which they were asked to produce texts with or without AI assistance. One week later, they were questioned about the origin of the ideas and the writing of the texts.