What seemed to be a solution for the lazy and busy when it comes to social interactions could have the opposite effect to the desired one. Researchers have discovered that humans have one more negative reaction when they discover that the person they are talking to has used AIs to assist you in writing your answers. The results relate to the perception of Effort in conversations.
One of the most popular uses of artificial intelligence recently is Generating images, codes and text through apps like ChatGPT in the last case. Its everyday applications are increasing, from collaborating on learning a topic to encouraging creativity as a literary assistant.
However, the barriers to implementing AI have never been clear, so opinions are still divided when evaluating the final product. While some advocate supporting artificial intelligence others consider them harmful and unreliable.
The latter was the trigger for a study conducted by Ohio State University in which the How hundreds of users responded to conversations conducted with an AI. The results seem to explain the intrinsic rejection of some groups of people towards assistants like ChatGPT.
Dr. Bingjie Liu and her team gathered a group of 208 adult volunteers for their testing. They were asked to conduct interviews with a person named Taylor, said to be a close friend from years ago, and a question was raised in connection with this. from three different conversation scenarios.
In the first part, the participant told Taylor that he was suffering from burnout syndrome; The second case consisted of Ask Taylor for advice about a conflict with a colleague, and the third conversation was about plans for his next birthday party.
The phrase “It’s the effort that counts” now has scientific support
Furthermore, they were told that this was the case in some cases Taylor used an AI to create and correct his answers; others were told that Taylor received help from an outside person with this task; A third group was assured that Taylor had found all the answers himself.
The results were consistent, with the majority of participants rating these interactions in the same way. Although they recognized that the responses received in each scenario showed “consideration” for their problems, In cases where an AI assisted Taylor, lower satisfaction was reported and Taylor was rated on the scale of “meets my needs to be a close friend“.
The researchers noted that part of these results is due to social perception The use of technology is very low and inappropriate when it comes to such personal interactions as asking for advice.
Interestingly, the study showed that participants also rated Taylor negatively when this was explained to them had received support from an external person in their answers.
“We found that people don’t believe that a friend should use a third party, be it an AI or another human, to maintain relationships.”“, explained Dr. Liu.
The study explains that the participants They felt that Taylor was putting a lot less effort into their friendship by seeking help, whether it was artificial or made by someone else. In both cases, participants felt less comfortable and confident about maintaining a friendship with Taylor, regardless of the quality of her advice.
“Effort is crucial in relationships. People want to know how much you’re willing to invest in a friendship, and if they feel like you’re taking shortcuts (like using AI or supporting another person), it won’t end well .”
The results of similar studies agree with those of Dr. Bingjie Liu agreed. In 2016, user preferences on social networks such as Facebook were analyzed. If the reaction to a post was limited to hitting the like button, the person who created the post took notice Relationship with the one who was on the other side as negative. However, if the answer was a detailed message, perception improved significantly.
Be careful, your friends might discover that you are using AIs on their own
Although these studies focused on environments that participants knew about in advance in which scenarios AIs were used To answer this, Dr. Liu said that with the increasing popularity of services like ChatGPT, people are starting to unconsciously perform the Turing Test in their minds.
In short, this is what the Turing Test was designed for distinguish whether the conversation partner is a human or a machine, based on subtleties such as simplicity, empathy and variety of topics. It is estimated that as AI becomes more widespread in both text and image generation, people will be more skeptical and vigilant in recognizing when an answer is legitimate.
The results of these studies confirm that the Perceived effort plays a crucial role in social interactions because in some cases a friend is asked not for advice but for support.
“In concussion, we found that to maintain a relationship, people differentiate internal and external efforts in technology-enhanced communication. It is the internal, personal effort that is valued and contributes to relationship well-being. Although AI can save users effort, from the other person’s perspective it reduces the perception of effort, thus affecting relationship satisfaction and increasing partner uncertainty..
