Female AI ‘teammate’ generates more participation from women

The findings counsel that the gender of an AI’s voice can positively tweak the dynamics of gender-imbalanced groups and will assist inform the design of bots used for human-AI teamwork, researchers mentioned.

The findings mirror earlier analysis that reveals minority teammates usually tend to take part if the workforce provides members just like them, mentioned Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, postdoctoral affiliate in info science and lead writer of the paper.

To raised perceive how AI may also help gender-imbalanced groups, Hwang and Andrea Stevenson Gained, affiliate professor of communication and the paper’s co-author, carried out an experiment with round 180 women and men who have been assigned to teams of three and requested to collaborate just about on a set of duties (the examine solely included contributors who recognized as both male or feminine).

Every group had both one lady or one man and a fourth agent within the type of an summary form with both a male or feminine voice, which would seem on display and browse directions, contribute an concept and deal with timekeeping. There was a catch — the bot wasn’t utterly automated. In what’s referred to in human-computer interplay as a “Wizard of Oz” experiment, Hwang was behind the scenes, feeding traces generated by ChatGPT into the bot.

After the experiment, Hwang and Gained analyzed the chat logs of workforce conversations to find out how usually contributors provided concepts or arguments. In addition they requested contributors to replicate on the expertise.

“After we checked out contributors’ precise behaviors, that is the place we began to see variations between women and men and the way they have been reacting when there was both a feminine agent or a male agent on the workforce,” she mentioned.

“One fascinating factor about this examine is that the majority contributors did not categorical a desire for a male- or female-sounding voice,” Gained mentioned. “This means that individuals’s social inferences about AI could be influential even when individuals do not imagine they’re vital.”

When girls have been within the minority, they participated extra when the AI’s voice was feminine, whereas males within the minority have been extra talkative however have been much less centered on duties when working with a male-sounding bot, researchers discovered. In contrast to the boys, girls reported considerably extra constructive perceptions of the AI teammate when girls have been the minority members, based on researchers.

“With solely a gendered voice, the AI agent can present a small diploma of assist to girls minority members in a gaggle,” mentioned Hwang.