Writing with AI boosts trust-building efficiency

AI-mediated communication promises efficiency but raises concerns about diminished authenticity and interpersonal trust. We examined this potential trade-off across two preregistered online experiments (N = 1,637) in which participants engaged in incentivized two-player trust games with communication. Half of the participants could use state-of-the-art predictive text assistance when composing a message to encourage trust; the others wrote unaided. We measured both objective (behavioral) and subjective (stated) trust. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses showed that AI assistance had minimal impact on trust, regardless of disclosure. AI-assisted participants wrote more efficiently, producing equally trust-inducing messages but in less time. This advantage persisted even when AI use was disclosed. Linguistic analyses indicated that AI-assisted messages were slightly less authentic than those written alone but that they exhibited greater warmth, complexity, and clout-features commonly associated with trustworthiness. These findings challenge the view that AI-mediated communication necessarily undermines trust, particularly in one-shot, transactional interactions.