Perception of Veracity and Believability in Human-Written and AI-Generated News Articles

Recently, generative AI has gained increased attention and impact across a variety of areas. Fake news can be used to manipulate public opinion, it is an important topic of investigation. Many factors affect how people perceive news in terms of believability and veracity, including the context. This study investigated how the platform (Facebook, X, and LinkedIn) on which an article is posted and its origin (AI-generated or human-written) affect perceptions of believability and veracity. The findings indicate that LinkedIn is the most trusted site, followed by X and Facebook. Participants who trusted Facebook content were more likely to find articles from all platforms real and believable. AI-generated articles were perceived as less believable and more likely to be fake than human-written ones when posted on Facebook or X, but the opposite was the case for LinkedIn. These findings indicate that trust in a platform may be connected to the overall perception of news articles and that the context in which an AI-generated article is posted may affect the way it is perceived