Messages known to involve AI are judged less trustworthy, less authentic and less useful, with larger penalties for greater involvement. A disclosure paradox compounds it: people say disclosure matters and then penalise it when it happens, which creates an incentive not to disclose.
How it was done
A framework for AI-mediated communication together with experimental work comparing how messages are judged depending on the AI involvement people believe is behind them.
What it means
The penalty attaches to belief about AI involvement, not to the text. The same words land differently depending on what the reader thinks produced them.
That inverts the value proposition for any product that drafts your outbound messages. What it produces is precisely the artefact that is losing its worth.
As machine-generated text becomes ordinary, the scarce signal is evidence that a specific person actually noticed something. Generated warmth cannot supply the fact that your friend remembered the surgery was in March.