Designed by Journalists, but Is It for Readers? Rethinking AI Disclosures and Transparency in News

Study finds AI disclosure designs in newsrooms fail readers, proposes user-agency-centered alternatives

A paper from arXiv examines how newsrooms disclose AI involvement in news content, finding that neither brief labels nor detailed disclosures achieve the goal of building reader trust. A controlled experiment with 34 readers shows detailed disclosures trigger a 'transparency dilemma' that can reduce trust, while one-line labels create an information gap requiring cognitive effort to fill. Readers instead preferred disclosure designs centered on user agency, including detail-on-demand interactions, proportional AI-ratio visualizations, and explicit 'no AI' labels. The author frames this as a design problem for the HCI community rather than a journalism ethics problem alone.