Artificial intelligence research is still quite far from developing chatbots that seem convincingly human. But how much does the delivery of the chatbot’s chat affect the result? What would happen if chatbot responses were delivered by a real human?
Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science have designed a series of experiments that test whether human delivery makes a difference in how people perceive an artificial intelligence system. The experiments, published last week in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, investigated this problem by using an “echoborg.” This is a person who acts as a human front for a chatbot: they say out loud the chatbot’s response to each input.
The echoborg is an artificial intelligence-themed adaptation of the “cyranoid” technique used in various psychology experiments, which sees one person shadow the speech of another. It turns out that shadowing speech (repeating exactly what someone else has said, while someone else is saying it) isn’t very hard for people. They’re able to do it with a delay of only a few hundred milliseconds, and they even automatically mimic features of the original speech like stress and pitch. This means that shadowed speech doesn’t sound noticeably different from the real thing.
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