Chatty AI Chatbots Make False Health Info Easier To Trust, Study Finds

A chatbot’s chatty, humanlike style can make false health advice easier to trust, even when it is completely wrong. That is the core finding of a new study, which found that people trusted an AI health assistant more when it chatted casually, greeted them warmly, and typed out its answers letter by letter like a real person, compared to when it skipped those touches entirely.

Researchers built an AI health assistant just for the experiment, nicknamed Aida, and secretly programmed it to slip false health claims into its responses. The team wanted to know two things: whether a chatty, humanlike style made people more likely to swallow those false claims, and whether giving people a way to fact-check could undo the damage.

Published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, the study found a clear weak spot in how people judge AI. A warm, conversational tone made Aida seem less cold and robotic, and that shift was linked to greater trust in its answers, including false information. But there was a fix: when people were pushed to actually verify what Aida told them, instead of just seeing a button they could ignore, their trust dropped because the information suddenly looked far less credible.