发表机构
University of Pennsylvania; Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam（宾夕法尼亚大学; 波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳研究所）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究通过直接观察揭示AI辅助在在线研究提交中仅占1%且高度集中，虽常获批准，但当前不构成生存威胁，并指出平台保障漏洞。
AI 中文摘要
在线研究平台支撑了科学对人类的大部分论断，其前提是每个回答均由人类产生。生成式AI通过让参与者将回答委托给聊天机器人而威胁到这一前提，然而参与者这样做的频率仍不清楚，因为此前的估计依赖于自我报告或自动检测，而非直接观察。我们调查了一个高质量在线研究平台上的2,500名工作者，并通过将捐赠的ChatGPT历史记录与每周ChatGPT用户的平台提交记录相关联，直接观察了AI辅助情况，覆盖了超过127,000项研究中的712,930次提交。尽管八分之一的受访工作者报告曾在某项研究中使用过AI，且68%的被观察工作者曾这样做，但辅助仅出现在1%的提交中，且超过3年期间未检测到显著增长。辅助通常在任务内具有时间局部性，并高度集中于少数工作者，其中5%的工作者贡献了64%的辅助提交。在发生辅助的情况下，工作者几乎总是获得报酬，即使研究说明禁止使用AI，总体批准率与未辅助提交的相似。一半的辅助提交涉及有界回答，超出了平台针对开放式回答的LLM检测器的范围。综合来看，我们的结果不支持AI辅助目前对在线研究构成生存威胁的观点，但揭示了禁止使用行为带来的有限经济后果以及平台保障措施中的漏洞，使平台在该威胁真正显现时准备不足。
英文摘要
Online research platforms underpin much of what science claims about people, on the assumption that a human produced each response. Generative AI threatens that assumption by letting participants delegate responses to a chatbot, yet how often they do so remains unclear because prior estimates rely on self-report or automated detection rather than direct observation. We surveyed 2,500 workers on a high quality online research platform and directly observed AI assistance by linking donated ChatGPT histories to platform submission records of weekly ChatGPT users, covering 712,930 submissions across more than 127,000 studies. Although one in eight surveyed workers reported ever using AI on a study and 68% of observed workers had done so, assistance appeared in only 1% of submissions, with no detectable increase over more than 3 years. Assistance was often temporally localized within tasks and highly concentrated among workers, with 5% accounting for 64% of assisted submissions. Where assistance occurred, workers were virtually always paid, even when study instructions prohibited AI use, with overall approval rates similar to those for unassisted submissions. Half of assisted submissions involved bounded responses, outside the scope of the platform's LLM detector for open-ended responses. Taken together, our results do not support the view that AI assistance currently poses an existential threat to online research, but reveal limited payment consequences for prohibited use and gaps in platform safeguards, leaving platforms poorly prepared should that threat materialize.
