Artificial Intelligence Could Sway Your Dating And Voting Preferences - AI Summary

"[I]t is not only a question of whether AI could influence people through explicit recommendation and persuasion, but also of whether AI can influence human decisions through more covert persuasion and manipulation techniques," the researchers write. While some studies have shown that AI can influence people's moods, friendships, dates, activities and prices paid online, as well as political preferences, research is scarce, the pair says, and has not disentangled explicit and covert influences. To help address this, they recruited more than 1300 people online for a series of experiments to investigate how explicit and covert AI algorithms influence their choice of fictitious political candidates and potential romantic partners. Results showed that explicit, but not covert, recommendation of candidates swayed people's votes, while secretly manipulating their familiarity with potential partners influenced who they wanted to date. The pair draws attention to the European Union's Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI and DARPA's explainable AI program as examples of initiatives to increase people's trust of AI. "[I]t is not only a question of whether AI could influence people through explicit recommendation and persuasion, but also of whether AI can influence human decisions through more covert persuasion and manipulation techniques," the researchers write.