Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2024 Rose E Guingrich, Michael S A Graziano
Whether artificial intelligence is conscious matters less than the fact that users can perceive it as conscious, because this perception may carry over into how they treat other people. When AI is viewed as having a humanlike mind, schemas activated during human-AI interaction become congruent with those used in human-human interaction, potentially altering social behavior. The argument focuses on humanlike social AI such as chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots. The paper reviews evidence from human-computer interaction and psychology, then proposes schema activation as a mechanism to test whether consciousness perception drives such carry-over effects. The authors suggest regulating how AI is built or treated, not because AI is sentient, but because of the downstream effects on human relationships.