A new study suggests that it can. From the Future of Being Human Substack.
Imagine that you’re talking with someone over Zoom and, as the conversation goes on, you begin to feel that they really get you — to the extent that a strong bond of trust quickly forms.
Now imagine that this sense of trust is the result of an AI that, unknown to either of you, is manipulating facial features in real time to influence how each of you feels about the other.
Disturbing as this seems, the possibility of using artificial intelligence to manipulate social connections in this way was demonstrated in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (also available for free here).
As I noted in this last week’s update to Future of Being Human subscribers, it’s a study that made me feel deeply uneasy, and one that raises serious questions around human agency in a world where AI can mediate how we feel about — and are potentially influenced by — others through digital media.
Interestingly, the research by Pablo Arias-Sarah and colleagues didn’t set out to study AI manipulation. Rather, they wanted to better-understand how social signals like smiles influence social interactions — something that’s still poorly understood.
Given the challenges of studying social interactions by manipulating people in real life without them knowing — a near-impossible task — the paper’s authors turned to AI. By using artificial intelligence to covertly alter social signals in real time on a custom-made video dating platform, they were able to tease out how participant smiles were directly associated with outcomes such as feelings of attraction …