Reading AI summaries makes people more likely to buy something — despite alarming 60% hallucination rate
Publish Date: 2026-03-14 06:00:00
Source Domain: www.livescience.com
- Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, conducted a study revealing that individuals are more inclined to buy products after reading AI summaries of reviews compared to human-written ones, despite AI hallucinating 60% of the time.
- This marks the first study demonstrating the cognitive biases caused by large language models (LLMs) and their quantitative impact on user behavior.
- AI summaries changed the sentiment of real reviews in 26.5% of cases, with AI models tending to focus on the beginning of texts and becoming less reliable with information outside their training data.
- Those who read the AI-generated summaries of product reviews showed a purchase intention rate of 84%, significantly higher than the 52% rate observed for those who read the original reviews.
- Researchers emphasized the potential for high-stakes scenarios, including media and education, where the distortion of consumer judgment and purchasing behavior can have more severe consequences.
- The study provides insight into the effects of LLMs and suggests steps towards analyzing and mitigating content alterations in various domains, reducing systemic bias risks.
