ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Perceived quality of AI-generated and human-written news: a cross-national experimental study among journalism students in China and Vietnam.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping news production, yet how journalism students evaluate AI-generated content and whether cultural-psychological factors systematically shape these evaluations remain poorly understood, particularly in non-Western contexts. Methods: This study employed a 2 (Country: China/Vietnam) × 2 (Author Type: AI/Human) × 4 (Topic: Nature/Health/Society/Finance) mixed-design ANOVA with 140 journalism and communication students under blind conditions. Participants evaluated news quality across seven dimensions without knowing whether articles were AI-generated or human-written. Results: AI-generated news received significantly higher overall ratings than human-written news. This advantage was not uniform: a significant Country × Authorship interaction indicated that Chinese participants showed a substantially larger preference for AI-generated news than Vietnamese participants, whose evaluations of the two content types did not differ significantly; a significant Authorship × Topic interaction indicated that the AI advantage was more pronounced for Nature and Society news than for Health and Finance news; and the three-way interaction was not significant. AI-generated news outperformed human-written news specifically on structural dimensions (perceived headline relevance, coverage adequacy, readability, and punctuation and sentence structure) but not on perceived factual accuracy or source usage. Gender predicted evaluations of both news types without a significant authorship-specific asymmetry, whereas news interest and news trust predicted evaluations of human-written news more strongly than AI-generated news, a pattern confirmed by direct interaction tests. Discussion: These patterns are discussed in relation to culturally grounded orientations toward institutional authority and technology, including the authority heuristic and techno-optimism, although these constructs were inferred from country-level cultural indices rather than directly measured among individual participants. A post hoc textual analysis found that AI-generated articles were not lexically less diverse than human-written articles, which complicates homogenization-based accounts of the cross-national convergence observed in AI-generated news evaluations. These findings extend cross-cultural psychology by illustrating both the promise and the limits of using country as a proxy for culturally embedded psychological constructs in research on AI-generated content.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.