  The ability to discern between true and false information is essential to
making sound decisions. However, with the recent increase in AI-based
disinformation campaigns, it has become critical to understand the influence of
deceptive systems on human information processing. In experiment (N=128), we
investigated how susceptible people are to deceptive AI systems by examining
how their ability to discern true news from fake news varies when AI systems
are perceived as either human fact-checkers or AI fact-checking systems, and
when explanations provided by those fact-checkers are either deceptive or
honest. We find that deceitful explanations significantly reduce accuracy,
indicating that people are just as likely to believe deceptive AI explanations
as honest AI explanations. Although before getting assistance from an
AI-system, people have significantly higher weighted discernment accuracy on
false headlines than true headlines, we found that with assistance from an AI
system, discernment accuracy increased significantly when given honest
explanations on both true headlines and false headlines, and decreased
significantly when given deceitful explanations on true headlines and false
headlines. Further, we did not observe any significant differences in
discernment between explanations perceived as coming from a human fact checker
compared to an AI-fact checker. Similarly, we found no significant differences
in trust. These findings exemplify the dangers of deceptive AI systems and the
need for finding novel ways to limit their influence human information
processing.
