Events

Prof. Jeremy Bertomeu
Professor of Accounting
Olin School of Business
Washington University in St Louis

This paper investigates the impact of generative AI on firms’ voluntary disclosure choices. Our theoretical model highlights a trade-off between AI’s improved ability to process disclosed information and its potential for misinformation, modeled as a random “hallucination” unrelated to the firms’ fundamentals. We predict that increased AI processing leads to more strategic non-disclosure due to two related economic forces. First, hallucinations provide additional camouflage after strategic non-disclosure. Second, because users consider the risk of misinformation, they discount observed marginal disclosures, further reducing the benefit of disclosure. To test our predictions, we leverage OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 as a shock to AI processing. Consistent with the theory, firms with more AI processing reduce their voluntary disclosures. Further, the introduction of ChatGPT reduces information processing failures, which manifests in increased information processing speed. Combining the crowding-out effect on information supply and the positive impact on information processing speed, we do not find evidence of a net increase in information quality.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5026360