Speaker: Ruben Durante (NUS Singapore)

Title: GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment (with Filipe Campante, Felix Hagemeister and Ananya Sen) 

When: Monday, 1 December 2025, 11:30 am – 13:00 pm

Where: Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz, lecture hall 7 (1st floor) (map)

Abstract:

We study how AI-generated misinformation affects demand for trustworthy news, using data from a field experiment by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), a major German newspaper. Readers were randomly assigned to a treatment that highlighted the difficulty of distinguishing real from AI-generated images. The treatment increased concern over misinformation (+0.3 s.d.) and reduced trust in all news sources (-0.1 s.d.), including SZ itself. Crucially, it also affected post-survey browsing behavior: daily visits to SZ digital content rose by 2.5% in the days following the treatment. In addition, subscriber retention increased by 1.1% over the following five months, corresponding to about a one-third drop in attrition rate. These results are consistent with a model in which the relative value of trustworthy news sources rises with the prevalence of misinformation, boosting engagement with these sources even as trust in news content declines.