Deceptive Patterns of Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
Karim Benharrak Tim Zindulka Daniel Buschek
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.