Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance human communication, for example, by improving the quality of our writing, voice or appearance. However, AI mediated communication also has risks-it may increase deception, compromise authenticity or yield widespread mistrust. As a result, both policymakers and technology firms are developing approaches to prevent and reduce potentially unacceptable uses of AI communication technologies. However, we do not yet know what people believe is acceptable or what their expectations are regarding usage. Drawing on normative psychology theories, we examine people's judgements of the acceptability of open and secret AI use, as well as people's expectations of their own and others' use. In two studies with representative samples (Study 1: N = 477; Study 2: N = 765), we find that people are less accepting of secret than open AI use in communication, but only when directly compared. Our results also suggest that people believe others will use AI communication tools more than they would themselves and that people do not expect others' use to align with their expectations of what is acceptable. While much attention has been focused on transparency measures, our results suggest that self-other differences are a central factor for understanding people's attitudes and expectations for AI-mediated communication.
We collected data from two sources - social media and online questionnaires - to investigate the emotional consequences of social sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 1 tracked and analysed sentiment of tweets posted over the course of a month in the crisis period and found that users who tweeted more frequently about COVID-19 expressed decreasing negative sentiment and increasing positive sentiment over time. Granger causality tests confirmed that this association was better interpreted in the forward direction (sharing levels predicting sentiment) than in the reverse direction (sentiment predicting sharing levels). Study 2 focused on immediate emotional consequences of sharing COVID-19-related events and found that participants reported improved overall affect about an event after sharing it, especially when that event was a personal experience rather than a news story. Reported positive feelings about both kinds of events were also significantly higher after sharing. Taken together, both studies suggested that social sharing is linked with emotional relief and may therefore help people to deal with their negative experiences during a persistent collective crisis.