Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools might soon “covertly influence” users’ decision making in a new commercial frontier called the “intention economy,” University of Cambridge researchers warned in a paper published yesterday.
The research argues the potentially “lucrative yet troubling” marketplace emerging for “digital signals of intent” could, in the near future, influence everything from buying movie tickets to voting for political candidates. Our increasing familiarity with chatbots, digital tutors and other so-called “anthropomorphic” AI agents is helping enable this new array of “persuasive technologies,” it added.
It would see AI combine knowledge of our online habits with a growing ability to know the user and anticipate his or her desires and build “new levels of trust and understanding,” the paper’s two coauthors wrote.
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Left unchecked, that could allow for “social manipulation on an industrial scale,” the pair, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, argued in the paper published in the Harvard Data Science Review.
It characterizes how this emergent sector — dubbed the “intention economy” — would profile users’ attention and communicative styles and connect them to patterns of behavior and choices they make.
“AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes,” coauthor Yaqub Chaudhary said.
The new AI would rely on so-called “large language models” to target a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, online history, and even preferences for flattery and ingratiation, the research said.
That would be linked with other emerging AI tech that bids to achieve a given aim, such as selling a cinema trip, or steering conversations toward particular platforms, advertisers, businesses and even political organizations.
“Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency,” coauthor Jonnie Penn said.
“It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions,” he added. “We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.”
Penn noted that public awareness of the issue is “the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong path.”
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