AI chat comes at a social cost by putting words in your mouth
You might find using AI technology helpful when chatting to others, but this latest research shows people will think less of someone using such tools.
Here’s how the study, led by folks at America’s Cornell University, went down. The team recruited participants, and split them into 219 pairs. These test subjects were then asked to discuss policy stuff over text messaging. For some of the pairs, both participants in each pairing were told to only use suggestions from Google’s Smart Reply, which follows a topic of conversation and recommends things to say. Some pairs were told not to use the tool at all, and for other pairs, one participant in each pairing was told to use Smart Reply.
One in seven messages were therefore sent using auto-generated text in the experiment, and these made conversations seemingly more efficient and with a positive tone. But if a participant believed the person they were talking to was replying with boilerplate responses, they thought they were being less cooperative and felt less warmly about them.
Malte Jung, co-author of the research published in Scientific Reports, and an associate professor of information science at Cornell, said it could be because people tend to trust technology less than other humans, or perceive its use in conversations as inauthentic.
