Deceptive Patterns of Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
This work addresses potential harms for users of commercial AI writing tools, but it is incremental as it applies existing concepts without new empirical results.
The paper tackles the problem of deceptive design patterns in AI writing assistants, such as hidden costs and unwanted content, by conceptually transferring known patterns from literature to this new context, with the goal of raising awareness and encouraging future research.
Large Language Models have become an integral part of new intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Many are offered commercially with a chatbot-like UI, such as ChatGPT, and provide little information about their inner workings. This makes this new type of widespread system a potential target for deceptive design patterns. For example, such assistants might exploit hidden costs by providing guidance up until a certain point before asking for a fee to see the rest. As another example, they might sneak unwanted content/edits into longer generated or revised text pieces (e.g. to influence the expressed opinion). With these and other examples, we conceptually transfer several deceptive patterns from the literature to the new context of AI writing assistants. Our goal is to raise awareness and encourage future research into how the UI and interaction design of such systems can impact people and their writing.