My BFF is a chatbot: Examining the nature of artificial relationships, and the role they play in communications and trust

Abstract

Artificially intelligent machines are becoming a bigger part of people’s lives. Consumers ask their Google Assistant for directions, talk to Siri about the weather, or buy something via a voice request on Amazon’s Alexa. While these interactions are far from perfect, they are steadily improving. Each new development or improvement in AI performance leads to more data being collected, and that enables the chatbot or AI to do its job better, and become more lifelike. Soon it might be difficult to distinguish humans from. And that could have a profound impact on society, trust, the way we communicate, and person-to-person interactions. Through a series of in-depth interviews, this capstone study examined human AI agent relationships, what the nature of those relationships might be, and how and to what extent two-way communications and trust played a part in establishing beneficial human AI agent relationships.