“Hey Siri, does the way we talk to you make humans less polite?”
Well, okay, they didn’t ask Siri. Or Alexa. Instead, they asked for 274, and after surveying those people, they found some good news: artificially-intelligent digital assistants do not treat adult human beings with other humans. Yet.
“Parents and news organizations alike are worried about how the personality of digital assistants affects our dignity, but we have little reason to worry about adults becoming indecent as a result of ordering around Siri or Alexa,” said Associate Professor James Gaskin at BYU Hours. “In other words, adults don’t need to say” please “and” thank you “when using a digital assistant.”
Gaskin and lead author Nathan Burton actually expected to do the opposite — that the way people deal with AIs would change their lives and interpersonal interactions. In their estimation, digital assistants in their current form are not articulated by adult users to human-to-human interactions.
But that may not be so in the case of children. Parental concerns have already prompted both Google and Amazon to make adjustments to their digital assistants, both of which now offer features that children can greet and appreciate when requested.
Gaskin and Burton did not study children, but generally assessed adolescents who formed their behavioral habits. Researchers are hoping that if they repeat the study with children, they will get different results.
As artificial intelligence becomes more humanoid — like the new vector robot — which includes parts such as expressive eyes, a moving head, and an arm — the effects on human interactions will increase because people are more aware that robots have emotion and understand it.
“Vector Robot seems to be doing a good job of making the digital assistant easier to express,” says Burton. “I believe that if we do a single study using a vector robot, we will find a much stronger impact on human interactions.”
This week’s research is being presented at the Americas Conference on Information Systems.
