The AI Ghostwriter Effect: When Users do not Perceive Ownership of AI-Generated Text but Self-Declare as Authors

Abstract

Human-AI interaction in text production increases complexity in authorship. In two empirical studies (n1 = 30 & n2 = 96), we investigate authorship and ownership in human-AI collaboration for personalized language generation. We show an AI Ghostwriter Effect : Users do not consider themselves the owners and authors of AI-generated text but refrain from publicly declaring AI authorship. Personalization of AI-generated texts did not impact the AI Ghostwriter Effect , and higher levels of participants’ influence on texts increased their sense of ownership. Participants were more likely to attribute ownership to supposedly human ghostwriters than AI ghostwriters, resulting in a higher ownership-authorship discrepancy for human ghostwriters. Rationalizations for authorship in AI ghostwriters and human ghostwriters were similar. We discuss how our findings relate to psychological ownership and human-AI interaction to lay the foundations for adapting authorship frameworks and user interfaces in AI in text-generation tasks.