Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
LiveScience
LiveScience
Drew Turney

Reading AI summaries makes people more likely to buy something — despite alarming 60% hallucination rate

AI Robot Team Assistant Service and Chatbot agent or Robotic Automation, conceptual illustration. Robot head shape in background amongst others head shapes behind.

Even though most Americans say they don't trust artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have found a startling new metric that seems to show the opposite: people are more likely to buy something after reading an AI summary of online reviews than one written by a human. Yet AI hallucinated 60% of the time when queried about the products.

The team, from the University of California, San Diego (UDSD), claims this is the first study to show how cognitive biases introduced by large language models (LLMs) have real consequences on user behavior. They also say it's the first project to measure the quantitative impact of AI influence on people.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.