You can fool some of the people all of the time: AIs and deception

 

Two papers that each consider trust and AIs are of interest, the first is 'Suspicious Minds: The Problem of Trust and Conversational Agents' by Jonas Ivarsson, University of Gothenburg. The second by Rogers and Webber, "Lying About Lying: Examining Trust Repair Strategies After Robot Deception in a High Stakes HRI Scenario". 

Artificial intelligence is getting so good at talking that it's hard to tell the difference between humans and machines.

It can now be difficult to know who you're talking to. 'Consequently, the ‘Turing test’ has moved from the laboratory into the wild', as Ivarsson states, If you think you're talking to a human, but it's actually a machine, you might share personal information that you wouldn't want to share with a machine.

This is also a problem because it can erode trust in human-to-human interactions. If people can't tell the difference between humans and machines, they might start to distrust each other.

'Therefore, this study concludes that the proliferation of conversational systems, fueled by artificial intelligence, may have unintended consequences, including impacts on human–human interactions.'

The issues that Ivarsson explored are only exacerbated by the topic of the second paper, as Webber states in this:

"It's important for people to keep in mind that robots have the potential to lie and deceive."

This study looked at how humans react when a robot lies to them. The study found that people are more likely to change their behavior if they are told that the robot is lying, and that an apology without acknowledging intentional deception is the best way to repair trust.

Designers and policy makers need to consider GPTs current abilities to deceive and what the implications are, even before we get to robots. 

In two to three years time, as manufacturers imbue more and more of your everyday technology with AI 'assistants', your phones, cars, TVs, etcetera, and you realise that they are lying to you, what will the human response be? Will their apologies be sufficient?