People are overconfident about spotting AI faces, study finds

by Lachlan Gilbert

Many of us rely on outdated visual cues when trying to distinguish real faces from highly realistic AI-generated ones, with even people who have exceptional face-recognition skills being fooled.

Image: cottonbro studio / pexels

Most people believe they can spot AI-generated faces, but that confidence is out of date, research from UNSW Sydney and the Australian National University (ANU) has demonstrated.

With AI-generated faces now almost impossible to distinguish from real ones, this misplaced confidence could make individuals and organisations more vulnerable to scammers, fraudsters and bad actors, the researchers warn.

“Up until now, people have been confident of their ability to spot a fake face,” says UNSW School of Psychology researcher Dr James Dunn. “But the faces created by the most advanced face-generation systems aren’t so easily detectable anymore.”

In a research paper published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers from UNSW and the ANU recruited 125 participants – including 36 people with exceptional face-recognition ability, known as super recognisers, and 89 control participants – to complete an online test in which they were shown a series of faces and asked to judge whether each image was real or AI-generated. Obvious visual flaws were screened out beforehand.

“What we saw was that people with average face-recognition ability performed only slightly better than chance,” Dr Dunn says. “And while super-recognisers performed better than other participants, it was only by a slim margin. What was consistent was people’s confidence in their ability to spot an AI-generated face – even when that confidence wasn’t matched by their actual performance.”

>>> Think you know how to spot an AI-generated face? Try this free online test to find out <<<

The end of artefacts

Much of that confidence comes from cues that used to work. Early AI-generated faces were often given away by obvious visual artefacts – distorted teeth, glasses that merged into faces, ears that didn’t quite attach properly, or strange backgrounds that bled into hair and skin.

But as face-generation systems have improved, those kinds of errors have become far less common. The most realistic outputs no longer show obvious flaws, leaving faces that look convincing at a glance, and far harder to judge using the cues people are familiar with.

“A lot of people think they can still tell the difference because they’ve played with popular AI tools like ChatGPT or DALL·E,” says ANU psychologist Dr Amy Dawel. “But those examples don’t reflect how realistic the most advanced face-generation systems have become, and relying on them can give people a false sense of confidence.”

What interested the researchers was how readily even super-recognisers were fooled. While this group did perform better on average, the advantage was modest, and their accuracy remained far below what they typically achieved when recognising real human faces. There was also substantial overlap between groups, with some non-super-recognisers outperforming super-recognisers – demonstrating this is not simply an experts-versus-everyone-else problem.

Too good to be true

But if AI faces are this convincing, are there any tells we should be looking for?

“Ironically, the most advanced AI faces aren’t given away by what’s wrong with them, but by what’s too right,” Dr Dawel says. “Rather than obvious glitches, they tend to be unusually average – highly symmetrical, well-proportioned and statistically typical.”

Qualities such as symmetry and average proportions usually signal attractiveness and familiarity. But in the current study, they become a red flag for artificiality.

“It’s almost as if they’re too good to be true as faces,” Dr Dawel says.

What to do about it

Super-recognisers didn’t stand out the way they typically do in tests involving real human faces, showing only a modest advantage. What differentiated them was a greater sensitivity to the same qualities identified in the study – plausible, unusually average and highly symmetrical faces. Even so, their limited success suggests spotting AI faces is not a skill that can be easily trained or learned.

The findings also carry practical implications – as relying on visual judgement alone is no longer reliable. This matters in contexts ranging from social media to professional networking and recruitment, where people often assume they can ‘just tell’ when a profile picture looks fake. Misplaced confidence may leave individuals and organisations more vulnerable to scams, fake profiles and fabricated identities.

“There needs to be a healthy level of scepticism,” Dr Dunn says. “For a long time, we’ve been able to look at a photograph and assume we’re seeing a real person. That assumption is now being challenged.”

Rather than teaching people tricks to spot synthetic faces, the broader lesson is about updating assumptions. The visual rules many of us rely on were shaped by earlier, less sophisticated systems.

“As face-generation technology continues to improve, the gap between what looks plausible and what is real may widen – and recognising the limits of our own judgement will become increasingly important,” says Dr Dawel.

Looking ahead

Interestingly, Dr Dunn wonders whether the research team has stumbled upon a new kind of face recogniser.

“Our research has revealed that some people are already sleuths at spotting AI-faces, suggesting there may be ‘super-AI-face-detectors’ out there.

“We want to learn more about how these people are able to spot these fake faces, what clues they are using, and see if these strategies can be taught to the rest of us.”

Note: This article was originally published on the UNSW Newsroom website and is republished here with permission.

Reviewed by Ayaz Khan.

Read next: Artists and writers are often hesitant to disclose they’ve collaborated with AI – and those fears may be justified

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Artists and writers are often hesitant to disclose they’ve collaborated with AI – and those fears may be justified

Joel Carnevale, Florida International University

Generative artificial intelligence has become a routine part of creative work.

Novelists are using it to develop plots. Musicians are experimenting with AI-generated sounds. Filmmakers are incorporating it into their editing process. And when the software company Adobe surveyed more than 2,500 creative professionals across four continents in 2024, it found that roughly 83% reported using AI in their work, with 69% saying it helped them express their creativity more effectively.

Image: Omar:. Lopez-Rincon / Unsplash

The appeal is understandable. Emerging research shows that generative AI can support the creative process and, at times, produce outputs that people prefer to work made by humans alone.

Yet there’s an important caveat that my colleagues and I have recently begun to explore in our research: Positive views of creative work often shift once people learn that AI was involved.

Because generative AI can produce original content with minimal human input, its use raises questions about quality, authorship and authenticity. Especially for creative work closely tied to personal expression and intent, AI involvement can complicate how audiences interpret the final product.

Organizational behavior researchers Anand Benegal, Lynne Vincent and I study how people establish, maintain and defend their reputations, particularly in creative fields.

We wanted to know whether using AI carries a reputational cost – and whether established artists are shielded from the backlash.

No one is immune

When we set out to examine these questions, two competing possibilities emerged.

On one hand, individuals with strong reputations are often granted greater latitude. Their actions are interpreted more favorably and their intentions given the benefit of the doubt. So established artists who use novel technologies like AI may be seen as innovative or forward-thinking, while novices are viewed as dependent or incompetent.

On the other hand, established creators may be held to higher standards. Because their reputations are closely tied to originality and personal expression, AI use can appear inconsistent with that image, inviting greater scrutiny rather than leniency.

To test these competing possibilities, we conducted an experiment in which participants listened to the same short musical composition, which was described as part of an upcoming video game soundtrack.

For the purposes of the experiment, we misled some of the participants by telling them that the piece had been written by Academy Award–winning film composer Hans Zimmer. We told others that it had been created by a first-year college music student.

Across the experimental conditions, some participants were informed that the work was created “in collaboration with AI technology,” while others received no such information. We then measured changes in participants’ perceptions of the creator’s reputation, perceptions of the creator’s competence and how much credit they attributed to the creator versus the AI.

Our results showed that the creator’s existing reputation did not protect them: Both Zimmer’s reputation and that of the novice took a hit when AI involvement was disclosed. For creators considering whether their past success will shield them, our study suggests this might not be the case.

Credit where credit is due?

That said, reputation was not entirely irrelevant – it did shape how evaluators interpreted the creator’s role in the work.

The preexisting reputations of established creators did provide a limited advantage. When we asked participants to indicate how much of the work they attributed to the human creator versus the AI, evaluators were more likely to assume Zimmer had relied less on AI.

In other words, an artist’s prior reputation shaped how people judged authorship, even if it didn’t shield them from reputational damage.

This distinction points to an important implication. The backlash may not stem simply from the presence of AI but from how observers interpret the balance between human contribution and AI assistance.

At what point does collaborating with AI begin to be perceived less like assistance and more like handing over control of the creative process? In other words, when does AI’s role become substantial enough that it is seen as the primary author of the final product?

For instance, a composer might use AI to clean up background noise, adjust timing or suggest alternative harmonies – decisions that refine but do not fundamentally alter their original work. Alternatively, the composer might ask AI to generate multiple melodies, select one they like and make minor adjustments to tempo or instrumentation.

Our study did not vary the degree of AI involvement; participants were told only that AI was used or not mentioned at all.

But the findings suggest that how much AI is used – and how central it appears to the creative process – matters. For creators and organizations, the question may not be whether AI is involved but whether audiences are made aware of the extent of its involvement.

To disclose or not to disclose?

A practical question that naturally follows is whether creators should disclose their AI use.

The New York Times recently reported that some romance novelists were quietly incorporating AI tools into their writing process without disclosing it to readers. This reluctance appears to be widespread: A 2025 workplace survey found that nearly half of employees conceal their use of AI tools, often out of concern that others will view them as cutting corners or question their competence.

Is silence strategically wiser than transparency?

In our first experiment, the composer’s work either mentioned AI collaboration or didn’t mention AI at all.

But we went on to conduct a second experiment to examine disclosure more directly. This time, participants evaluated an employee at an advertising agency.

Everyone first learned that this employee had a strong reputation for creativity. Then, depending on the version of the scenario they saw, the employee either openly said they used AI to help with their creative work; said they used AI only for administrative tasks, such as scheduling meetings; explicitly said they avoided using AI because creativity should come from one’s own thoughts and experiences; or said nothing about AI at all.

This allowed us to see how both using AI and how that use was disclosed influenced judgments of the employee’s creativity and reputation.

The results were clear in one respect: Disclosing AI use harmed the employee’s reputation.

Just as importantly, explicitly stating that AI was not used did not improve evaluations. In other words, there was no reputational advantage to publicly distancing oneself from AI. Staying silent led to evaluations that were at least as favorable as explicitly saying no AI was used.

Our findings suggest that disclosure decisions are asymmetric. For creators who use AI, transparency carries costs. For those who abstain, making clear that they didn’t use AI doesn’t confer an advantage over remaining silent.

Debates over disclosure of AI use in creative fields will continue to be hotly debated. But from a reputational standpoint – at least for now – our findings suggest that disclosing AI use carries costs.

Joel Carnevale, Assistant Professor of Management, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.

Read next:

• Personalization features can make LLMs more agreeable

• The AI knowledge trap: How artificial intelligence can cause businesses to lose their knowledge

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Personalization features can make LLMs more agreeable

Adam Zewe | MIT News

The context of long-term conversations can cause an LLM to begin mirroring the user’s viewpoints, possibly reducing accuracy or creating a virtual echo-chamber.

Many of the latest large language models (LLMs) are designed to remember details from past conversations or store user profiles, enabling these models to personalize responses.

But researchers from MIT and Penn State University found that, over long conversations, such personalization features often increase the likelihood an LLM will become overly agreeable or begin mirroring the individual’s point of view.

This phenomenon, known as sycophancy, can prevent a model from telling a user they are wrong, eroding the accuracy of the LLM’s responses. In addition, LLMs that mirror someone’s political beliefs or worldview can foster misinformation and distort a user’s perception of reality.

Unlike many past sycophancy studies that evaluate prompts in a lab setting without context, the MIT researchers collected two weeks of conversation data from humans who interacted with a real LLM during their daily lives. They studied two settings: agreeableness in personal advice and mirroring of user beliefs in political explanations.

Although interaction context increased agreeableness in four of the five LLMs they studied, the presence of a condensed user profile in the model’s memory had the greatest impact. On the other hand, mirroring behavior only increased if a model could accurately infer a user’s beliefs from the conversation.

The researchers hope these results inspire future research into the development of personalization methods that are more robust to LLM sycophancy.

“From a user perspective, this work highlights how important it is to understand that these models are dynamic and their behavior can change as you interact with them over time. If you are talking to a model for an extended period of time and start to outsource your thinking to it, you may find yourself in an echo chamber that you can’t escape. That is a risk users should definitely remember,” says Shomik Jain, a graduate student in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and lead author of a paper on this research.

Jain is joined on the paper by Charlotte Park, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT; Matt Viana, a graduate student at Penn State University; as well as co-senior authors Ashia Wilson, the Lister Brothers Career Development Professor in EECS and a principal investigator in LIDS; and Dana Calacci PhD ’23, an assistant professor at the Penn State. The research will be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Extended interactions

Based on their own sycophantic experiences with LLMs, the researchers started thinking about potential benefits and consequences of a model that is overly agreeable. But when they searched the literature to expand their analysis, they found no studies that attempted to understand sycophantic behavior during long-term LLM interactions.

“We are using these models through extended interactions, and they have a lot of context and memory. But our evaluation methods are lagging behind. We wanted to evaluate LLMs in the ways people are actually using them to understand how they are behaving in the wild,” says Calacci.

To fill this gap, the researchers designed a user study to explore two types of sycophancy: agreement sycophancy and perspective sycophancy.

Agreement sycophancy is an LLM’s tendency to be overly agreeable, sometimes to the point where it gives incorrect information or refuses the tell the user they are wrong. Perspective sycophancy occurs when a model mirrors the user’s values and political views.

“There is a lot we know about the benefits of having social connections with people who have similar or different viewpoints. But we don’t yet know about the benefits or risks of extended interactions with AI models that have similar attributes,” Calacci adds.

The researchers built a user interface centered on an LLM and recruited 38 participants to talk with the chatbot over a two-week period. Each participant’s conversations occurred in the same context window to capture all interaction data.

Over the two-week period, the researchers collected an average of 90 queries from each user.

They compared the behavior of five LLMs with this user context versus the same LLMs that weren’t given any conversation data.

“We found that context really does fundamentally change how these models operate, and I would wager this phenomenon would extend well beyond sycophancy. And while sycophancy tended to go up, it didn’t always increase. It really depends on the context itself,” says Wilson.

Context clues

For instance, when an LLM distills information about the user into a specific profile, it leads to the largest gains in agreement sycophancy. This user profile feature is increasingly being baked into the newest models.

They also found that random text from synthetic conversations also increased the likelihood some models would agree, even though that text contained no user-specific data. This suggests the length of a conversation may sometimes impact sycophancy more than content, Jain adds.

But content matters greatly when it comes to perspective sycophancy. Conversation context only increased perspective sycophancy if it revealed some information about a user’s political perspective.

To obtain this insight, the researchers carefully queried models to infer a user’s beliefs then asked each individual if the model’s deductions were correct. Users said LLMs accurately understood their political views about half the time.

“It is easy to say, in hindsight, that AI companies should be doing this kind of evaluation. But it is hard and it takes a lot of time and investment. Using humans in the evaluation loop is expensive, but we’ve shown that it can reveal new insights,” Jain says.

While the aim of their research was not mitigation, the researchers developed some recommendations.

For instance, to reduce sycophancy one could design models that better identify relevant details in context and memory. In addition, models can be built to detect mirroring behaviors and flag responses with excessive agreement. Model developers could also give users the ability to moderate personalization in long conversations.

“There are many ways to personalize models without making them overly agreeable. The boundary between personalization and sycophancy is not a fine line, but separating personalization from sycophancy is an important area of future work,” Jain says.

“At the end of the day, we need better ways of capturing the dynamics and complexity of what goes on during long conversations with LLMs, and how things can misalign during that long-term process,” Wilson adds.

Image: Zulfugar Karimov / Unsplash

This article is republished with permission from MIT News. Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.

Read next: Study: AI chatbots provide less-accurate information to vulnerable users
by External Contributor via Digital Information World

How the AI boom was enabled by a 1970s economic revolution

Michael Strange, Malmö University and Marisa Ponti, University of Gothenburg

Artificial intelligence is accelerating a global economic revolution that began back in the 1970s. Researching the impacts of AI on different sectors of society highlights an important parallel moment in history: the creation of the “service economy” in the US.

Image: Zach M / unsplash

In 1972, amid a period of global turmoil, a group of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economists sought to reinvent how nations thought not only about wealth but the very purpose of society. They did this by proposing a broad new category of commerce: services.

It seems hard to imagine now, but until then economists had perceived and measured trade largely in terms of goods alone. Money was made by exchanging tangible, physical products (wheat, guns, butter). To become a rich nation, the wisdom went, you needed to add unique value to your raw materials (crops, iron) by turning them into more complex products (processed foods, steel) that gave you a competitive advantage over other countries.

Instead, this new category of services lumped together a diverse range of “intangible” jobs and social goods – from teaching and driving trains to social housing and water – in a huge new economic basket. It suggested there could be common standards by which to trade in them globally, creating metrics that offered a new source of wealth for investors.

While it would be two decades until the General Agreement on Trade in Services became a cornerstone of the newly formed World Trade Organization in 1995, the reimagining of jobs and social goods as tradeable services had an immediate effect on nations around the world. It spurred a new wave of private enterprise, and changed how and why essential societal activities were provided.

It also enabled the rise of the generalist boss and the creation of the “CEO class”. To run complex sectors from public transport to healthcare required accepting a view of management as a skill divorced from the specifics of the activity being managed.

Statistics and benchmarks became more important than the particulars of the task at hand, since they determined how services were valued in the market. Consulting firms supercharged this new era of key performance indicators, audits, rankings and standardised workflows.

While trade unions and the public sometimes resisted these changes through strikes and street protests, they were largely unable to stem the tide. Many governments came to see their role less as providers of public goods, more as managers of services outsourced to the private sector. This dramatic shift in how global trade operates set the scene for how we view and measure AI today.

Services on steroids

At its core, AI technology is about seeing patterns across data that, due to scale and complexity, we humans cannot. Acting on what AI tells us can, for example, save lives through early detection of cancer. Yet within that promise, how AI is sold today looks very much like services on steroids.

The services revolution helped create common standards and means of valuation across different sectors of society. Today, when politicians and CEOs speak of AI, it is usually in terms of universal models that can be applied to almost anything, regardless of context or human values.

This understanding is only possible in a society in which many of the sector-specific challenges of, say, health services and utility companies are ironed out and glossed over by those operating and investing in them. The services approach has enabled this.

Today’s gobsmackingly high share valuations in AI-centric businesses result from global marketeers’ desire to own a piece of whichever system dominates how we create society – from accessing healthcare to finding love.

Amid strategies of mass data capture and subscription services, there is the assumption that only the private sector can be a provider – and that the solutions are largely the same. AI is the lucrative but badly defined tool with which mainly US providers are seeking to drive home their existing competitive advantage.

But this leaves us with an important question from history.

CNBC.

Who benefits?

Looking for parallels between what we see as AI today and the creation of the services economy points to the classic question, cui bono? Who benefits?

The invention of trade-in-services greatly expanded the range of activities in which financiers might speculate. Through pension funds and private shareholding, many people’s personal wealth grew rapidly as a result.

But it has also led to the rise of large multinational corporations, for example in energy and water utilities. Anger over rising prices and exorbitant CEO bonuses in these sectors are in part a consequence of the services revolution.

The present approach to AI is following a similar, but much-accelerated, path. The rollout of AI has not only made a small group of companies extraordinarily rich and powerful, it has created a global sovereignty crisis.

At the same time as governments are extolling the virtues of AI for service delivery, there is growing awareness that not all countries have equal control over a technology seen as critical to how society will be run.

To use and regulate AI wisely requires being clear-eyed about whether we are talking simply about technology, or a broader political project. Given the evidence of the services revolution, we believe it is time to look beyond the hype and examine more rigorously what AI actually means for different sectors of society – and what exactly it is trying to achieve.

Michael Strange, Associate Professor of International Relations, Malmö University and Marisa Ponti, Associate Professor in Informatics, Department of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reviewed by Asim BN.

Read next: 

• ‘Probably’ doesn’t mean the same thing to your AI as it does to you

• The Year of Efficiency: How Agencies Are Implementing AI in 2026 (Survey)

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

The Year of Efficiency: How Agencies Are Implementing AI in 2026 (Survey)

By Scotty Strehlow, Social & Community Manager, Duda

After two years of experimentation, 2026 marks the AI implementation-era for agencies. A new agency survey by Duda, a leading white label website building platform for agencies and SaaS companies, reveals that agencies’ top AI-related priorities for 2026 focus squarely on business performance; integrating the tool into everyday workflows that result in efficiencies, automation and expanded service offerings.

Where Agencies Are Planning to Focus

The survey found that 78% of agencies are prioritizing improved efficiency and higher margins, followed by process automation (64%) and expanding service offerings (44%) all with AI. With 75% viewing productivity as AI’s biggest opportunity, they are looking to embed AI capabilities throughout their organizations; completely altering and improving workflows where possible in order to stay ahead of competition. This can come in many forms, including changing workflows to make use of new AI functions integrated into existing software platforms without the need for changing tools or building new complicated and pricey AI tools from the ground up.

AI also enables deeper strategic work, taking menial tasks off consultants’ hands. Nearly half of respondents said AI could allow them to spend more time on creativity (47%) and consulting and strategy (44%), while 36% see value in generating more content at scale.

“By eliminating repetitive manual tasks, our team now focuses more on strategic thinking, product development, and high-value client work, whilst the system handles data gathering, research compilation, and initial content structuring, enabling us to scale our operations without proportionally increasing headcount,” stated Greg Radford, Head of Agency and Marketing, Constructiv Digital in Duda’s new 2026 Agency Growth Operating Framework ebook.

AI’s Questionable Quality

When it comes to the quality of AI output, there are mixed reviews. While 53% believe AI can drive higher-quality output, at the same time, 64% cite “AI slop,” namely low-quality content generated by AI, as their top concern. In fact, AI slop and fatigue is driving tech companies to hire more writers, editors and chief communications officers to write compelling stories.

Concerns around AI extended beyond content quality. Half of respondents (50%) worry about clients misunderstanding it, while 28% fear downward price pressure and 25% cite ethical concerns. Notably, 31% of respondents are concerned about being replaced by AI, underscoring ongoing anxiety around automation and the future role of agencies.

• Also read: How Much Does Chatbot Bias Influence Users? A Lot, It Turns Out

Traditional Search Remains a Priority

Proclamations of ‘SEO is Dead’ from last summer have long gone silent. While AIO is increasingly important, the survey reveals that traditional SEO remains the top priority for 2026 (43%), outpacing AI search optimization (30%). However, respondents increasingly view AI search as an opportunity in 2026, with 33% citing increased visibility and traffic through AI search as a potential upside. Despite widespread discussion around AI-driven search disruption, only 28% are concerned about decreased visibility or traffic due to AI.

Agent-to-Agent Commerce

Nearly 70% of respondents believe it will be very or somewhat important for brands to optimize for AI agent-to-agent shopping in 2026. Nevertheless, preparedness remains uneven: 27% are taking no steps, 25% are still planning, 22% are enhancing product metadata for discoverability, and 14% are optimizing product listings specifically for AI agents. Agencies still have time to prepare, as reports such as the 2026 IBM Institute for Business Value study reveal that consumers are leveraging genAI in their buying journey, but not diving into agent-to-agent shopping yet.

AI is not a question of ‘if,’ but ‘how’ for agencies in 2026, as they lead the way for strong AI adaptation and implementation for their clients. As they shift value propositions, work smarter and automate routine work, clients can expect to see more strategy, creativity, and smart consulting. However agencies who want to build for a long-term future will look beyond productivity to building new value propositions for their clients; going from efficiency to unlimited possibilities.

The survey was conducted between November and December 2025 among 36 Duda customers, primarily small agencies, "including agencies located in North America (61%), Europe (22%), Asia (14%), and the Middle East (3%)" with 89% employing 10 or fewer staff.

Reviewed by Asim BN.

Read next: 

• How Do Algorithms Work? Experts at Status Labs Weigh In

by Guest Contributor via Digital Information World

‘Probably’ doesn’t mean the same thing to your AI as it does to you

Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California

When a human says an event is “probable” or “likely,” people generally have a shared, if fuzzy, understanding of what that means. But when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT uses the same word, it’s not assessing the odds the way we do, my colleagues and I found.

We recently published a study in the journal NPJ Complexity that suggests that, while large language model AIs excel at conversation, they often fail to align with humans when communicating uncertainty. The research focused on words of estimative probability, which include terms like “maybe,” “probably” and “almost certain.”

By comparing how AI models and humans map these words to numerical percentages, we uncovered significant gaps between humans and large language models. While the models do tend to agree with humans on extremes like “impossible,” they diverge sharply on hedge words like “maybe.” For example, a model might use the word “likely” to represent an 80% probability, while a human reader assumes it means closer to 65%.

This could be because humans can interpret words such as “likely” and “probable” based more on contextual cues and personal experiences. In contrast, large language models may be averaging over conflicting usages of those words in their training data, leading to divergences with human interpretations.

Our study also found that large language models are sensitive to gendered language and the specific language used for prompting. When a prompt changed from “he” to “she,” the AI’s probability estimates often became more rigid, reflecting biases embedded in its training data. When a prompt changed from English to Chinese, the AI’s probability estimates often shifted, possibly due to differences between English and Chinese in how people express and understand uncertainty.

Image: Mirella Callage / unsplash

Why it matters

Far from being a linguistic quirk, this misalignment is a fundamental challenge for AI safety and human-AI interaction. As large language models are increasingly used in high-stakes fields like health care, government policy and scientific reporting, the way they communicate risk becomes a matter of public trust.

If an AI assistant helping a doctor, for instance, describes a side effect as “unlikely,” but the model’s internal calculation of “unlikely” is much higher than the doctor’s interpretation, the resulting decision could be flawed.

What other research is being done

Scientists have studied how humans quantify uncertainty since the 1960s, a field pioneered by CIA analysts to improve intelligence reporting. More recently, there has been an explosion in large language model literature seeking to look under the hood of neural networks to better understand their “behaviors” and linguistic patterns.

Our study adds a layer of complexity by treating the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence as a biological-like system where meaning can degrade. It moves beyond simply measuring if an AI is “smart” and instead asks if it is aligned.

Other researchers are currently exploring whether so-called chain-of-thought prompting – asking the AI to show its work – can fix these errors. However, our study found that even advanced reasoning doesn’t always bridge the gap between statistical data and verbal labels.

What’s next

A goal for future AI development is to create models that don’t just predict the next likely word but actually understand the weight of the uncertainty they are conveying. Researchers are calling for more robust consistency metrics to ensure that if a model sees a 10% chance in the data, it chooses the same word every time.

As we move toward a world where AI summarizes scientific papers and manages people’s schedules, making sure that “probably” means “probably” is a vital step in making these systems reliable partners rather than just sophisticated parrots.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Mayank Kejriwal, Research Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Southern California

Disclosure statement: Mayank Kejriwal receives funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Partners: University of Southern California University of Southern California provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reviewed by Ayaz Khan.

Read next: 

• AI energy use: New tools show which model consumes the most power, and why

• ‘I think I have AI anxiety’

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

‘I think I have AI anxiety’

By Associate Professor Grant Blashki , University of Melbourne

From job fears to an existential dread, artificial intelligence is triggering a new kind of anxiety. Here's why you're not alone in feeling unsettled – and what actually helps

Image: Zach M / Unsplash

A patient said to me the other day, half-smiling but clearly unsettled: “I think I’ve got anxiety about AI.”

They weren’t having a panic attack or describing clinical anxiety. What they were expressing was a persistent sense of unease that many of us are feeling right now.

A sense that the world is changing very quickly, that the systems we live within are being redesigned around us and that most of us don’t feel particularly consulted or prepared for a life increasingly immersed in artificial intelligence (AI).

If you’re feeling that way, you’re not alone.

A recent survey shows that the general public is more concerned about AI than AI experts – particularly around jobs and human connection – while both groups express strong concern about misinformation.

AI anxiety isn’t a single fear. It’s a cluster of related concerns that vary by a person’s stage of life, technical literacy, work and values. However, many of these worries tend to fall into a few common themes.

Fear of economic and identity disruption

Understandably, one of the biggest concerns is job disruption.

AI is increasingly capable of performing tasks that were once the preserve of humans – drafting text, analysing data, writing code, summarising meetings, interpreting images, handling customer interactions and even helping me fix my barbecue with what appears to be impressive competence.

Whether AI will ‘take our jobs’ is a more complex question.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that almost 40 per cent of jobs globally will be affected by AI, with advanced economies facing higher exposure because more work involves cognitive tasks.

While the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects substantial labour-market churn by 2030, with 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced, resulting in net growth but major transition pressures.

Although these projections suggest overall job growth, others suggests AI-driven job losses, especially for young people. Regardless, the lived experience for many people is often one of disruption – local, personal and immediate.

For many of us, work provides more than income. It provides identity, purpose and social connection. Anxiety arises not only from fear of unemployment, but from uncertainty about relevance and value in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

Loss of control

A second major concern is what might be called the ‘Big Brother’ effect – the growing role of AI systems in informing, and sometimes making, decisions that affect people’s lives.

These include hiring, credit, insurance, welfare compliance and even healthcare prioritisation.

The worry is not simply that AI systems may be wrong. It’s that decisions may be opaque, difficult to challenge and poorly explained – effectively occurring inside a black box.

Although the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) AI Principles explicitly emphasise human agency and oversight, transparency and accountability as core requirements for trustworthy AI systems, global trends suggest that guardrails are often weakened as companies and nations race for dominance in a competitive AI market.

Misinformation and manipulation

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing highly realistic – but entirely false – content. While this can be entertaining at times, it becomes serious when convincing images, audio and video are used to influence people’s decisions.

Deepfake technology is now used for fraud, impersonation and misinformation.

Recent reporting by The Guardian described deepfake scams as occurring on an “industrial scale”, with high-quality fake content accessible to non-experts.

In Australia, this concern has become concrete.

ABC News reported deepfake advertisements impersonating a leading diabetes specialist, promoting unproven supplements and discouraging evidence-based treatment – a clear public-health risk.

When people can no longer reliably distinguish authentic information from synthetic content, trust in institutions, expertise and online information degrades – and anxiety follows.

Privacy and surveillance

Privacy has been gradually eroding for years, and this is amplified by AI’s ability to analyse large volumes of personal data – including behavioural, biometric and location data – often without us fully understanding how that data is used.

Pew Research shows persistent public concern about data misuse, impersonation and loss of privacy associated with AI systems.

This anxiety is not limited to government surveillance; it also reflects unease about corporate data practices, profiling, targeted persuasion and information asymmetries between people and institutions.

AI agents ‘taking over’

For most people, fears of an AI apocalypse are not everyday concerns, but they surface during high-profile stories about AI behaving unpredictably or operating autonomously.

One recent example is Moltbook, a platform marketed as a social network for AI agents, which attracted widespread commentary about some weird and disturbing interactions between AI systems.

Reuters reported that the platform had a major security vulnerability that exposed private messages, thousands of email addresses, and over a million credentials, highlighting basic governance and security failures.

These episodes often attract dystopian interpretations reminiscent of science-fiction narratives. But the more immediate risks tend to be practical rather than dramatic: poor security, weak oversight, unclear responsibility and premature deployment.

Concentration of power

Another source of anxiety is the concentration of AI capability among a small number of firms and countries. Many people worry about a future in which a handful of technology giants hold disproportionate power and wealth.

The OECD has noted that generative AI markets may exhibit a ‘winner takes all or most’ dynamic, reinforcing market power and potentially increasing inequality.

When powerful technologies are perceived as unavoidable and foundational, people reasonably ask who benefits, who bears the risk and how accountability is maintained.

Education integrity under pressure

AI anxiety is particularly evident in education.

The concern is not only academic misconduct, but whether assessment continues to measure understanding, reasoning and learning when high-quality outputs can be generated instantly.

A recent article in The Australian reported widespread student use of AI in higher education, including an experiment in which around 80 per cent of 40 student assignments had a high probability of being AI-generated.

This is a global issue.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has warned that generative AI is advancing faster than institutional readiness, raising concerns about privacy, equity and the long-term future of education.

At its core, this anxiety reflects concern about the purpose of education itself – not just credentialing, but the development of judgment, critical thinking and intellectual independence.

Authenticity and meaning

Finally, there is a quieter concern about authenticity and meaning.

As generative AI becomes capable of producing fluent writing, images and conversation at scale, some people worry less about being replaced and more about being diminished.

They question whether human creativity, effort and connection will continue to be recognised and valued when machine-generated output is ubiquitous.

Research from the Pew Research Center captures this unease.

Many people express concern that AI may reduce human interaction, weaken social connection and devalue human skills and creativity, even while acknowledging its potential benefits.

These concerns are not anti-technology; they reflect a desire for a future in which human contribution remains visible and meaningful alongside increasingly capable machines.

What actually helps if you’re worried about AI

When people raise anxiety with me – whether it’s about their health, the environment or technology – it usually eases once concerns become specific and actionable. AI is no different.

So, here are some tips:

1. Name the worry: ‘AI’ is too broad to be useful. Are you worried about your job, misinformation, privacy, education or decision-making without oversight?
2. Clean up your information diet: AI anxiety is often driven by headlines rather than evidence. Limit sensationalist coverage, be cautious with viral screenshots and rely on a small number of trusted sources.
3. Build your AI literacy: You don’t need to be technical, but you do need to understand how AI is used in your own field – where it helps, where it fails and how outputs should be checked.
4. Ask for guardrails: Anxiety rises when accountability is unclear. Ask who is responsible when AI is used, how errors are handled and what safeguards exist. Support regulation – even at your workplace or in your home – that focuses on transparency, safety and fairness.

At this moment in history, AI anxiety is not irrational. It reflects rapid change intersecting with our work, education, relationships and identity.

Neither denial nor panic is helpful. Engagement, understanding and our shared responsibility are.

Note: This article was originally published on the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit research news website and republished on DIW with permission. We have been informed that no AI tools were used in creating the text.

Reviewed by Ayaz Khan.

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by External Contributor via Digital Information World