“Artificial Intelligence Becomes More Human with Personal Information Sharing”

Our brains are wired to trust someone more if they share some personal stuff with us. If someone entrusts you with some personal information, you feel more comfortable with that person. Very logical in itself, but what if that is not a human, but a robot? Research shows that we are more likely to see robots as humans when they tell us something ‘personal’.

Talk to AI

Many companies are working on all sorts of natural ways to get the robot to talk to you. If you have a conversation with someone, then someone doesn’t say very staccato: ‘Yes, we will do that.’ Someone is more likely to say: ‘Oh, how nice! Let’s do that yes!’ But yes, how do you teach that to a computer program? This is done through Natural Language Processing, but there are of course more ways to ensure that we as humans have the feeling of having a nice, normal conversation.

This can be done, for example, by letting people think that they are not having a conversation with a robot, but with a human. One of the better ways to do that would be according to Japans research by letting the robot tell something ‘personal’ from itself. You may wonder what a robot goes through that allows it to say something personal, but you might consider that the robot may have had a previous conversation with a human and tell something about it. Maybe someone asked him more about what to expect in a breast cancer journey. A robot could later tell you that he had that conversation. However, you may wonder whether such a story will stick: after all, a robot will not say how it felt about it and it is precisely emotions that linger with us for a long time.

Personal information

The researchers had participants chat online with artificial intelligence, whose avatar was a photo of a human or a photo of a robot. The conversation was a sort of “coffee machine” conversation as if they were on a lunch break, and in each conversation the robot took a moment to talk about a hobby, a personal work-related incident, or didn’t give any personal information. The 918 participants were then asked to complete a questionnaire, which showed that personal, work-related information performed best, followed by hobbies . Personal information thus generates empathy. Also special: people do not care whether the robot is depicted as a robot or as a human being. That makes you think about how perfectionist you are about your avatar, doesn’t it?

So yes, if developers of artificial intelligence are smart, they will not only focus on how the sentences that are answered sound as natural as possible, but also on convincing the human that he or she is talking to a ‘human’ through the AI learn to tell something ‘personal’. In short, if a robot comes up with a nice anecdote, we are more inclined to trust it, see it as a human being and therefore perhaps come up with a funny anecdote ourselves. The recipe for long-lasting friendship, right?