The AI Ghostwriter Effect: When Users Do Not Perceive Ownership of AI-Generated Text But Self-Declare as Authors

Human-AI interaction in text production increases complexity in authorship. In two empirical studies (n1 = 30 & n2 = 96), we investigate authorship and ownership in human-AI collaboration for personalized language generation. We show an AI Ghostwriter Effect: Users do not consider themselves the owners and authors of AI-generated text but refrain from publicly declaring AI authorship. Personalization of AI-generated texts did not impact the AI Ghostwriter Effect, and higher levels of participants’ influence on texts increased their sense of ownership. Participants were more likely to attribute ownership to supposedly human ghostwriters than AI ghostwriters, resulting in a higher ownership-authorship discrepancy for human ghostwriters. Rationalizations for authorship in AI ghostwriters and human ghostwriters were similar. We discuss how our findings relate to psychological ownership and human-AI interaction to lay the foundations for adapting authorship frameworks and user interfaces in AI in text-generation tasks.