New Research Suggests Robots Appear More Persuasive When Pretending to be Human

Recent technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have made it possible for machines, or bots, to pass as humans. A team of researchers led by Talal Rahwan, associate professor of Computer Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, conducted an experiment to study how people interact with bots whom they believe to be human, and how such interactions are affected once bots reveal their identity. The researchers found that bots are more efficient than humans at certain human–machine interactions, but only if they are allowed to hide their non-human nature. In their paper titled "Behavioral Evidence for a Transparency-Efficiency Tradeoff in Human-Machine Cooperation" published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers presented their experiment in which participants were asked to play a cooperation game with either a human associate or a bot associate. This game, called the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, was designed to capture situations in which each of the interacting parties can either act selfishly in an attempt to exploit the other, or act cooperatively in an attempt to attain a mutually beneficial outcome.