Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views

If large language models like GPT-3 preferably produce a particular point of view, they may influence people's opinions on an unknown scale. This study investigates whether a language-model-powered writing assistant that generates some opinions more often than others impacts what users write - and what they think. In an online experiment, we asked participants (N=1,506) to write a post discussing whether social media is good for society. Treatment group participants used a language-model-powered writing assistant configured to argue that social media is good or bad for society. Participants then completed a social media attitude survey, and independent judges (N=500) evaluated the opinions expressed in their writing. Using the opinionated language model affected the opinions expressed in participants' writing and shifted their opinions in the subsequent attitude survey. We discuss the wider implications of our results and argue that the opinions built into AI language technologies need to be monitored and engineered more carefully.

Studying writer-suggestion interaction: A qualitative study to understand writer interaction with aligned/misaligned next-phrase suggestion

We present an exploratory qualitative study to understand how writers interact with next-phrase suggestions. While there has been some quantitative research on the effects of suggestion systems on writing, there has been little qualitative work to understand how writers interact with suggestion systems and how it affects their writing process - specifically for a non-native but English writer. We conducted a study where amateur writers were asked to write two movie reviews each, one without suggestions and one with. We found writers interact with next-phrase suggestions in various complex ways - writers are able to abstract multiple parts of the suggestions and incorporate them within their writing - even when they disagree with the suggestion as a whole. The suggestion system also had various effects on the writing processes - contributing to different aspects of the writing process in unique ways. We propose a model of writer-suggestion interaction for writing with GPT-2 for a movie review writing task, followed by ways in which the model can be used for future research, along with outlining opportunities for research and design.