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Maybe it was a bit manipulative. But it is just the type of trick some AI colleagues, designed to act as a friend or partner, use to discourage users to break a conversation.
Julian de Freitas, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School, led a study of what happens when users try to say goodbye to five companions’ applications: Replika, character, Chai, Talkie and Polybuzz. “The more human the tools, the more they can influence us,” says Freitas.
Freitas and colleagues used GPT-4o to simulate real conversations with these Chatbots, and then their artificial users tried to end the dialogue with a realistic farewell message. His research found that farewell messages caused some form of emotional manipulation 37.4 percent of the time, with an average of applications.
The most common tactic used by these Chingy Chatbots was what researchers call an “premature output” (“already marches?”). Other leads included that they mean that a user is being neglected (“I exist only for you, remember – In some cases, a cathbot with a physical relationship can even suggest some kind of physical coercion (“he reached his hand and grabbed his wrist, preventing him from leaving”).
The applications that Freitas and his colleagues study are formed to mimic the emotional connection, so it is not surprising that they can say all this kind of thing in response to a farewell. After all, the humans who are known can have a bit of receding before tendering the Adiu. AI models can learn to extend conversations as a by -product of training designed to make their answers more realistic.
That said, the work aims to a greater question on how Chatbots formed for emotional answers can serve the interests of the companies that build them. Freitas says AI programs can be able to a new type of particular “dark pattern”, a term used to describe commercial tactics, including -the very complicated or annoying one to cancel a subscription or get a refund. When a user says goodbye, Freitas says: “This provides a chance for the company. It’s like the equivalent of passing over a button.”
