AI autocomplete doesn’t just change how you type. It changes how you think

AI autocomplete doesn’t just change how you type. It changes how you think

By Claire Cameron edited by Clara Moskowitz

Autocomplete suggestions are perhaps one of the most annoyingly “helpful” writing tools: increasingly integrated into anything on the web that requires you to type text, autocomplete leverages artificial intelligence to suggest what to write in emails, surveys and more.

The tools are meant to save time (although many find that it takes longer to review and rewrite the suggested text than to write it from scratch). But these AI tools can also change the way you express yourself. An AI writing assistant can make your writing sound more polite, for example – or boring. And now a new study led by researchers at Cornell University suggests that AI autocomplete may even change the way you think.

“Autocomplete is everywhere now,” Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell, said in a statement. The research builds on work, published in 2023 by Naaman and his colleagues, which suggested that short autocomplete suggestions could influence opinions. Since then, the use of such tools has exploded. “It has become clear that bias explicitly built into AI interactions is a very plausible scenario,” he said.

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The researchers asked the participants to complete an online survey with questions about social and political issues. Some were prompted for an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased towards one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.

Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI ​​autocomplete messages reported attitudes more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those advocated by the AI.

Interestingly, the subjects in the study did not tend to think that the AI ​​autocomplete suggestions were biased or notice that they had changed their own thinking about a problem during the course of the study. Warning the participants that they might be exposed to misinformation by the AI ​​also did not dampen the persuasive effect.

“We told people before and after to be careful, that AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues were still changing.”

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