Texts generated by large language models, or AI-powered chatbots, exhibit characteristic “personality” traits. Such chatbots can also identify individual personality traits in texts. However, humans are more reliable at distinguishing between human-written and AI-generated texts, according to researchers at the Institute of Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

“Chatbots are becoming part of more and more areas of our lives, from customer service and digital counseling services to personal chatbots that many people already use every day and even share their feelings with,” said Sophie Körner, a research associate in the Department of Personality Psychology and Psychological Assessment at JGU and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports. “That is why we need to understand how we perceive chatbot-generated texts and whether we can still distinguish them from human-written texts.”