AI-Assisted Submissions in Online Research Are Rare and Highly Concentrated but Routinely Approved
Online research platforms underpin much of what science claims about people, on the assumption that a human produced each response. Generative AI threatens that assumption by letting participants delegate responses to a chatbot, yet how often they do so remains unclear because prior estimates rely on self-report or automated detection rather than direct observation. We surveyed 2,500 workers on a high quality online research platform and directly observed AI assistance by linking donated ChatGPT histories to platform submission records of weekly ChatGPT users, covering 712,930 submissions across more than 127,000 studies. Although one in eight surveyed workers reported ever using AI on a study and 68% of observed workers had done so, assistance appeared in only 1% of submissions, with no detectable increase over more than 3 years. Assistance was often temporally localized within tasks and highly concentrated among workers, with 5% accounting for 64% of assisted submissions. Where assistance occurred, workers were virtually always paid, even when study instructions prohibited AI use, with overall approval rates similar to those for unassisted submissions. Half of assisted submissions involved bounded responses, outside the scope of the platform's LLM detector for open-ended responses. Taken together, our results do not support the view that AI assistance currently poses an existential threat to online research, but reveal limited payment consequences for prohibited use and gaps in platform safeguards, leaving platforms poorly prepared should that threat materialize.