Efects of communication directionality and ai agent diferences in human-ai interaction

Abstract

In Human-AI collaborative settings that are inherently interactive, direction of communication plays a role in how users perceive their AI partners. In an AI-driven cooperative game with partially observable information, players (be it the AI or the human player) require their actions to be interpreted accurately by the other player to yield a successful outcome. In this paper, we investigate social perceptions of AI agents with various directions of communication in a cooperative game setting. We measure subjective social perceptions (rapport, intelligence, and likeability) of participants towards their partners when participants believe they are playing with an AI or with a human and the nature of the communication (responsiveness and leading roles). We ran a large scale study on Mechanical Turk (n=199) of this collaborative game and fnd signifcant diferences in gameplay outcome and social perception across diferent AI agents, diferent directions of communication and when the agent is perceived to be an AI/Human. We fnd that the bias against the AI that has been demonstrated in prior studies varies with the direction of the communication and with the AI agent.