Influential public discourse shapes public beliefs and can also mislead, not only through what is stated, but also through how information is framed, omitted, contextualised, and communicated. Yet less research has focused on how such misleadingness arises and shapes the interpretations formed by readers. To address this gap, we introduce Reader-Centric Misleadingness Understanding (RCMN), a framework that operationalises misleadingness through five dimensions: misleading mechanism, likely reader interpretation, evidence-warranted interpretation, emotional arousal, and communicative intent. Based on this framework, we construct an evidence-grounded dataset of influential public discourse. Empirical findings show that misleadingness is diverse and extends well beyond fabrication, with unsupported inference, exaggeration, and omission among the prevalent mechanisms, and is frequently associated with heightened emotional arousal and distortive communicative intent. Moreover, we investigate whether lightweight claim-and-context representations retain sufficient cues for understanding reader-centric misleadingness without access to richer contextual, evidential, and multimodal information. Evaluation across five recent generative foundation models shows that reader-level interpretations can often be recovered from such limited representations, whereas identifying how misleadingness is produced remains considerably more challenging. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight representations for scalable misleadingness analysis, while reliable understanding of misleading mechanisms continues to require richer contextual and evidential grounding.
Jacy Reese Anthis, Erik Brynjolfsson, James Evanscs.CY cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG stat.ML
How can humans make sense of the rapid takeoff of artificial intelligence (AI)? We studied the sensemaking dynamics of AI through an open-ended, mixed-methods study with computational text analysis of millions of AI-related newspaper articles and social media posts grounded in 57 semi-structured interviews with AI professionals in 2021 and 2023--before and after the recent surge of public interest. We identify a range of sociological frames (interpretive schemas that structure collective cognition) and show how AI professionals use frames to address significant cognitive challenges, such as assigning responsibility for societal impacts. We develop a framework of three primary debates across which frames are adopted and contested: (i) the $\textit{method}$ of AI development, between frames of top-down expert systems and bottom-up emergent capabilities, (ii) the $\textit{mind}$ of an AI system, ranging from a passive tool to a humanlike "digital mind," and (iii) the $\textit{morality}$ of how AI is used, particularly the decision of whether to slow down or speed up AI development. As humanity enters the era of transformative AI, technologists and policymakers must account for the framing dynamics that will circumscribe our beliefs, values, and actions.