Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have raised widespread concern about the use of this technology to spread audio and visual misinformation. In response, there has been a major push among policymakers and technology companies to label AI-generated media appearing online. It remains unclear, however, what labels are most effective for this purpose. Using two pre-registered survey experiments (total N = 7,579 Americans), we evaluate the consequences of different labeling strategies for viewers' beliefs and behavior. Overall, we find that all the labels we tested significantly decreased participants' belief in the presented claims. When it comes to engagement intentions, however, labels that merely informed participants that content was AI-generated tended to have limited impact, whereas labels emphasizing the content's potential to mislead more strongly influenced self-reported behavior, especially in the first study. Together, these results shed light on the relative advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to labeling AI-generated media.
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Wittenberg et al. (2024) studied this question.
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