The Character We Create: Anthropomorphizing AI

And so I was really interested when you told me this story in the parking lot, and I thought, I need to do a little bit of digging here and see...

Has this happened to others before? And by this, I don't mean like your particular interaction with the chatbot, but this idea of, you know, trust in working with technology.

And so I've uncovered some really interesting research.

And so I'm going to share some of it with you.

And then I want to see if it resonates with what you shared.

experienced.

So there's actually a body of research that goes back to the 1990s.

So Clifford Nass and colleagues at Stanford developed what's called the CASA paradigm.

So that's computers are social actors.

So the core of this is that humans unthinkingly apply the same social heuristics we use for human interactions when we're interacting with computers.

We do this automatically, without conscious thought, Because computers actually trigger the same social cues that humans do.

The researchers called this mindlessness.

And they didn't mean that, you know, as an insulting piece, but just like technically mindlessness, where we've been so repeatedly exposed to social cues in interpersonal communication, that when we encounter something that resembles those cues, like in conversation with a chatbot, we automatically employ the same social rules we would use with another person.

I found that super interesting.

And I'm curious, you know, hearing that, does that kind of resonate maybe with the experience you had?

It definitely does.

Yeah, it definitely does.

That lines up.

Yeah.

And one of the words they use in their research is character.

And it made me think of, you know, have we been building characters for A.I.? ? And you had said earlier, you know, that this was an AI that you'd work with quite a bit and you felt like you trusted it, you knew how it would respond.

Do you think you'd almost built up a character for who this AI was? And maybe we've seen like the character break.

I think

that there's definitely parallels there.

I think one piece to add to this conversation is that as far as trusting different systems go as well, we also kind of rely on the opinions of others or the recommendations of others and what we think the strengths and weaknesses of a particular technology could be.