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March 14, 2026Science Advances11 citationsOpen Access

Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues

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SWSterling Williams-CeciMJMaurice JakeschABAdvait Bhat

Key Points

  • This research examines how AI writing assistants impact user attitudes on societal issues during text composition.
  • Two large-scale preregistered experiments with 2582 participants were conducted.
  • Participants wrote about societal issues while exposed to biased AI autocomplete suggestions.
  • Posttask surveys assessed participants' attitudes and awareness of the AI's bias.
  • Participants' attitudes aligned more closely with the AI's suggestions after exposure.
  • Many participants were unaware of the bias influencing their attitudes.
  • The AI's influence surpassed that of similar suggestions given as static text.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make autocomplete suggestions to people as they write text. Can these AI writing assistants affect people's attitudes in this process? In two large-scale preregistered experiments (N = 2582), we exposed participants writing about important societal issues to an AI writing assistant that provided biased autocomplete suggestions. When using the AI assistant, the attitudes participants expressed in a posttask survey converged toward the AI's position. However, a majority of participants were unaware of the AI suggestions' bias and their influence. Further, the influence of the AI writing assistant was stronger than the influence of similar suggestions presented as static text, showing that the influence is not fully explained by these suggestions, increasing accessibility of the biased information. Last, warning participants about assistants' bias before or after exposure does not mitigate the attitude-shift effect.

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Cite This Study

Williams-Ceci et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69b4ad7918185d8a39800ba7https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adw5578
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