Anne-Marie Nussberger and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, decided to investigate how often respondents use artificial intelligence after noticing examples in their own work. “The incidence rates that we were observing were really shocking,” she says.
They found that 45 per cent of participants who were asked a single open-ended question on Prolific copied and pasted content into the box – an indication, they believe, that people were putting the question to an AI chatbot to save time.
Further investigation of the contents of the responses suggested more obvious tells of AI use, such as “overly verbose” or “distinctly non-human” language. “From the data that we collected at the beginning of this year, it seems that a substantial proportion of studies is contaminated,” she says.
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