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People Don’t Learn to Trust Bots 

People Don’t Learn to Trust Bots 

4 years ago
Anonymous $yQ5BfQaAxy

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-dont-learn-to-trust-bots/

As artificial-intelligence products steadily improve at pretending to be human—an AI-generated voice that books restaurant reservations by phone, for example, or a chat bot that answers consumers' questions online—people will increasingly be put in the unsettling situation of not knowing whether they are talking to a machine. But the truth may make such products less effective: recent research finds a trade-off between transparency and cooperation in human-computer interactions.

The study used a simple but nuanced game in which paired players make a series of simultaneous decisions to cooperate with or betray their partner. In the long run, it pays for both to keep cooperating—but there is always the temptation to defect and earn extra points short term, at the partner's expense. The researchers used an AI algorithm that, when posing as a person, implemented a strategy that was better than people are at getting human partners to cooperate. But previous work suggested people tend to distrust machines, so the scientists wondered what would happen if the bot revealed itself as such.