Abstract:  This meta-analysis summarizes evidence on how readers perceive the credibility, quality, and readability of automated news in comparison to human-written news. Overall, the results, which are based on experimental and descriptive evidence from 12 studies with a total of 4,473 participants, showed no difference in readers’ perceptions of credibility, a small advantage for human-written news in terms of quality, and a huge advantage for human-written news with respect to readability. Experimental comparisons further suggest that participants provided higher ratings for credibility, quality, and readability simply when they were told that they were reading a human-written article. These findings may lead news organizations to refrain from disclosing that a story was automatically generated, and thus underscore ethical challenges that arise from automated journalism.

Keywords:  automated news; computational journalism; credibility; journalism; meta-analysis; perception; quality; review; robot journalism

Published:   10 July 2020

Issue:   Vol 8, No 3 (2020): Algorithms and Journalism: Exploring (Re)Configurations