The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to its application in many areas, including news media. The integration of AI in journalism presents both opportunities and risks for democracy, making it crucial to understand public reception of and engagement with AI-generated news, as it may directly influence political knowledge and trust. This preregistered study investigates (i) the perceived quality of AI-assisted and AI-generated versus human-generated news articles, (ii) whether disclosure of AI's involvement in generating these news articles influences engagement with them, and (iii) whether such awareness affects the willingness to read AI-generated articles in the future. We employed a between-subjects survey experiment with 599 participants from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, who evaluated the credibility, readability, and expertise of news articles. These articles were either written by journalists (control group), rewritten by AI (AI-assisted group), or entirely generated by AI (AI-generated group). Our results indicate that all news articles, regardless of whether they were written by journalists or AI, were perceived to be of equal quality. When participants in the treatment groups were subsequently made aware of AI's involvement in generating the articles, they expressed a higher willingness to engage with (i.e., continue reading) the articles than participants in the control group. However, they were not more willing to read AI-generated news in the future. These results suggest that aversion to AI usage in news media is not primarily rooted in a perceived lack of quality, and that by disclosing using AI, journalists could attract more immediate engagement with their content, at least in the short term.

翻译：人工智能（AI）的发展已使其应用于包括新闻媒体在内的诸多领域。AI在新闻业中的整合为民主制度带来了机遇与风险，因此理解公众对AI生成新闻的接受度与参与度至关重要，因其可能直接影响政治认知与信任。这项预注册研究探讨：（i）AI辅助生成、AI生成与人工撰写的新闻文章在感知质量上的差异；（ii）披露AI参与生成新闻文章是否影响读者对其的参与度；（iii）此种认知是否会改变未来阅读AI生成文章的意愿。我们在瑞士德语区对599名参与者实施了组间调查实验，评估了新闻文章的可信度、可读性与专业性。这些文章分别由记者撰写（对照组）、经AI改写（AI辅助组）或完全由AI生成（AI生成组）。研究结果表明，所有新闻文章无论由记者或AI创作，均被感知为具有同等质量。当处理组的参与者随后知悉AI参与文章生成时，他们表现出比对照组更高的文章参与意愿（即继续阅读）。然而，他们并未表现出更强的未来阅读AI生成新闻的意愿。这些结果提示，对新闻媒体中使用AI的抵触情绪主要并非源于感知质量不足，且通过披露AI的使用，新闻从业者或可在短期内为其内容吸引更直接的参与。