“My AI must have been broken”: How AI Stands to Reshape Human Communication

Abstract

From autocomplete and smart replies to video filters and deepfakes, we increasingly live in a world where communication between humans is augmented by artificial intelligence. AI often operates on behalf of a human communicator by recommending, suggesting, modifying, or generating messages to accomplish communication goals. We call this phenomenon AI-Mediated Communication (or AI-MC) [1, 4]. While AI-MC has the potential of making human communication more efficient, it impacts other aspects of our communication in ways that are not yet well understood. Over the last three years, my collaborators and I have been documenting the impact of AI-MC on communication outcomes, language use, interpersonal trust, and more. The talk will outline early experimental findings from this work, mostly led by Cornell and Stanford graduate students Maurice Jakesch, Hannah Mieczkowski, and Jess Hohenstein. For example, the research shows that AI-MC involvement can result in language shifting towards positivity [2, 7]; impact the evaluation of others [2, 4]; change the extent to which we take ownership over our messages [6]; and shift assignment of blame for communication outcomes [3]. Given the impact of AI-MC on interpersonal evaluations, the talk will also cover our recent research examining the (mostly false) heuristics humans use when evaluating whether text was written by AI [5]. Overall, AI-MC raises significant practical and ethical concerns as it stands to reshape human communication, calling for new approaches to the development and regulation of these technologies.