AI Bylines in Sports: An Experiment on Audience Perceptions of the Credibility and Comprehensibility of Sports News and Commentary

This study uses an experiment to examine the effect of human and AI authorship on participants’ perceptions of the credibility and comprehensibility of sports articles. The study additionally measured differences in these evaluations when the article is a game/match report versus an analytical commentary. Participants ( N = 430) recruited from Prolific Academic were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions and exposed to four articles that were also randomized by order. The articles equally covered women and men’s football (soccer) and basketball in the UEFA and W/NBA leagues. The study found human-authored articles to be rated more credible than AI-authored ones, but no significant differences appeared in evaluations of comprehensibility between AI and human authors and between news reports and commentaries. Testing the moderating effects of sports fanship and attitudes towards AI on perceptions of credibility and comprehensibility did not produce any significance. This study makes an important contribution to credibility theory, showing that in today’s AI age, human expertise still matters.