Artificial intelligence could sway your dating and voting preferences
Scientists show how online algorithms can manipulate people’s decisions.
AI algorithms on our computers and smartphones have quickly become a pervasive part of everyday life, with relatively little attention to their scope, integrity, and how they shape our attitudes and behaviours.
Spanish researchers have now shown experimentally that people’s voting and dating preferences can be manipulated depending on the type of persuasion used.
“Every day, new headlines appear in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has overtaken human capacity in new and different domains,” write Ujue Agudo and Helena Matute, from the Universidad de Deusto, in the journal
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Artificial intelligence-based algorithms can influence people to prefer one political candidate – or a would-be partner – over another, according to researchers.
“We are worried that everyone is using recommendation algorithms all the time, but there was no information on how effective those recommendation algorithms are,” says Helena Matute at the University of Deusto in Spain.
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Her work with her colleague Ujué Agudo, also at the University of Deusto, was designed to investigate the issue.
The researchers carried out a series of four experiments in which participants were told they were interacting with an algorithm that would judge their personality. The ‘algorithm’ did not actually do this: it was a mock algorithm that responded in the same way regardless of the information participants gave it. After participants had answered the mock algorithm’s questions, it presented them with photos of potential partners they might