Artificially intelligent chatbots have become so powerful they can influence how users make life or death decisions, a study has claimed. Researchers found people's opinion on whether they would sacrifice one person to save five was swayed by answers given by ChatGPT. They have called for future bots to be banned from giving advice on ethical issues, warning the current software'threatens to corrupt' people's moral judgement and may prove dangerous to'naïve' users. The findings – published in journal Scientific Reports - come after the grieving widow of a Belgian man claimed he had been encouraged to take his own life by an AI chatbot. Others have told how the software, which is designed to talk like a human, can show signs of jealousy - even telling people to leave their marriage.

"[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.

In a new series of experiments, artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithms were able to influence people's preferences for fictitious political candidates or potential romantic partners, depending on whether recommendations were explicit or covert. Ujué Agudo and Helena Matute of Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021. From Facebook to Google search results, many people encounter A.I. algorithms every day. Private companies are conducting extensive research on the data of their users, generating insights into human behavior that are not publicly available. Academic social science research lags behind private research, and public knowledge on how A.I. algorithms might shape people's decisions is lacking. To shed new light, Agudo and Matute conducted a series of experiments that tested the influence of A.I. algorithms in different contexts.

AI algorithms on our computers and smartphones have quickly become a pervasive part of everyday life, with relatively little attention to their scope, integrity, and how they shape our attitudes and behaviours. Spanish researchers have now shown experimentally that people's voting and dating preferences can be manipulated depending on the type of persuasion used. "Every day, new headlines appear in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has overtaken human capacity in new and different domains," write Ujue Agudo and Helena Matute, from the Universidad de Deusto, in the journal PLOS ONE. "This results in recommendation and persuasion algorithms being widely used nowadays, offering people advice on what to read, what to buy, where to eat, or whom to date," they add. "[P]eople often assume that these AI judgements are objective, efficient and reliable; a phenomenon known as machine bias."

When webpages influence choice: Effects of visual primes on experts and novices.

The emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) risks provoking a public backlash as it increasingly falls into private hands, threatens people's jobs, and operates without effective oversight or regulatory control, leading experts in the technology warn. At the start of a new Guardian series on AI, experts in the field highlight the huge potential for the technology, which is already speeding up scientific and medical research, making cities run more smoothly, and making businesses more efficient. But for all the promise of an AI revolution, there are mounting social, ethical and political concerns about the technology being developed without sufficient oversight from regulators, legislators and governments. The report found that AI had the potential to add £630bn to the economy by 2035. But to reap the rewards, the technology must benefit society, she said.

The emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) risks provoking a public backlash as it increasingly falls into private hands, threatens people's jobs, and operates without effective oversight or regulatory control, leading experts in the technology warn. At the start of a new Guardian series on AI, experts in the field highlight the huge potential for the technology, which is already speeding up scientific and medical research, making cities run more smoothly, and making businesses more efficient. But for all the promise of an AI revolution, there are mounting social, ethical and political concerns about the technology being developed without sufficient oversight from regulators, legislators and governments. The report found that AI had the potential to add £630bn to the economy by 2035. But to reap the rewards, the technology must benefit society, she said.

Big data collected from customer behaviour from all strata of the Internet has added valuable information to improve sales force and customer services. With the analytical power of Machine Learning, the mass of data can be transformed into thin causalities. For example, the Artificial Intelligence algorithms are able to review the complexity of Big Data and simplify the client's information through accurate analysis of the buying journey. Since its first public use in the late 1990s, Machine Learning continues to be discussed. AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London to play the board game Go, represents one of the most notable examples of deep learning; that is to say a machine now is able to independently analyze the amounts of data with extremely high performance.