Study Suggests Robots Are More Persuasive When They Pretend To Be Human

Advances in artificial intelligence have created bots and machines that can potentially pass as humans if they interact with people exclusively through a digital medium. Recently, a team of computer science researchers have studied how robots/machines and humans interact when the humans believe that the robots are also human. As reported by ScienceDaily, the results of the study found that people find robots/chatbots more persuasive when they believe the bots are human. Talal Rahwan, the associate professor of Computer Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, has recently led a study that examined how robots and humans interact with each other. The results of the experiment were published in Nature Machine Intelligence in a report called Transparency-Efficiency Tradeoff in Human-Machine Cooperation. During the course of the study, test subjects were instructed to play a cooperative game with a partner, and the partner may be either a human or a bot.