The ongoing transformation goes beyond the commercial level, a new lucrative market is in its infancy following the logic of the so-called “intention economy,” points out the analysis of the University of Cambridge, in a publication of “Harvard Data Science Review.”
The explosion of generative AI and the growing familiarity of humans with chatbots open a new frontier for the supposed “persuasive technologies,” hinted at in recent corporate announcements by technological giants, say researchers from the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) of the British university.
According to experts, anthropomorphic AI agents, from chatbot assistants to digital tutors, will have access to vast amounts of intimate psychological and behavioural data, often obtained through informal, conversational spoken dialogue.
This AI will combine knowledge of people’s online habits with an uncanny ability to tune into them, in order to generate levels of trust and understanding that allow social manipulation on an industrial scale, the ethicists said.
“Huge resources are being spent to place AI assistants in all areas of life, which should raise the question of what interests and purposes these supposed assistants are intended to serve,” said Dr Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting researcher at LCFI.
What people say when they converse, how they say it and the kind of inferences that can be made in real time as a result, are much more intimate than simple records of online interactions, the academic added in a statement.
According to Chaudhary, AI tools are being used to extract, infer, collect, record, understand, predict, and ultimately manipulate and commodify the future decisions of Internet users.
For decades, attention has been the currency of the Internet; sharing attention with social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram drove the online economy and, unless regulated, the intention economy will treat motivations as the new currency, said Dr. Jonnie Penn, a technology historian at LCFI.
A commerce centered on Internet users’ intentions would go beyond the current practice of selling users’ attention to the highest bidder, especially on social networks, for example, to subject them to targeted advertising based on their browsing habits or history.
According to the authors of the study, transnational companies such as OpenAI (ChatGPT), Shopify, Nvidia, Meta or Apple are analyzing the potential in sight.
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