Can a simple warning change how we respond to AI answer boxes in search engines? 🧐💡
The paper "Exploring the Impact of Warnings on User Perception towards AI-Generated Content in Search Results" by Pia Donabauer and David Elsweiler takes a close look at this question. 🔍 Their study investigates whether a lightweight disclosure banner can help users engage more critically with AI-generated answers.
⚠️ Why does this matter?
As AI answer boxes become standard in search engines, their influence grows - even when the content may not always be reliable.
📊 What the study found:
A simple warning did not shift overall opinions, but it made users 83% more likely to challenge the AI's stance.
Agreement is a strong anchor: When users initially agreed with the AI, opinion change dropped by 85%, and exploration of opposing results fell significantly.
When the AI disagreed with users, 41% of the participants' post-task explanations drifted linguistically towards the chatbot's wording (vs. 14% when they already agreed).
💡 Takeaway:
Transparency banners can encourage users to adopt a more critical stance towards AI output - but they are not a complete solution. Additional bias-mitigation strategies are needed to support balanced information seeking in AI-augmented search. 🛠️🤖
📍 The study was presented at ACM CIKM 2025, one of the major international forums for Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management, held from November 10-14 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Finally, this work highlights just how impressive our students are - and how committed we are to supporting them in publishing their research:
Pia Donabauer conducted this study as part of an undergraduate seminar paper, and David Elsweiler supervised the project and guided it all the way to publication. A fantastic achievement by both! 🎉👏
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#Research #AI #AIResearch
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#ACM #ConferenceOnInformationAndKnowledgeManagement #CIKM #CIKM2025
#ResearchSuccess #StudentSuccess #ResearchPaperAccepted
#InformationScienceRegensburg #StayInformed
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