David Smailes

Last month, I got an email from a senior leader I deeply admire. Something about it felt sterile. I couldn’t see or hear him in the message. Like fake flowers on a conference room table, it looked real, but something was missing. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, calls this “thin slicing,” the ability to make quick judgments from very little information. And one pattern people are getting very good at spotting is AI-written content. Take these two phrases. Which one sounds like AI?

Citation: Smailes D, Aleksandra A, Coakley M, Mair S, Ventress J (2025) Examining the availability/findability of stimuli employed in social media and body image research. PLoS One 20(5): e0324514. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0324514 Editor: Tyler Horan, UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Received: November 5, 2024; Accepted: April 25, 2025; Published: May 22, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Smailes et al.

Introduction Over the past decade, psychology (like many other disciplines, such as oncology; Begley & Ellis, 2012) has faced a so-called ‘replication crisis’, where many findings have been shown to not be replicable (see Nosek et al., 2015). This has been followed by attempts to address these problems by engaging in methodological practices that increase the transparency, reproducibility, and replicability of psychological science (Nelson et al., 2018).