The silicon service spectrum: warmth and competence explain people’s preferences for AI assistants

dc.contributor.authorHernandez, Ivanen
dc.contributor.authorChekili, Amalen
dc.date.accessioned2025-03-21T14:34:24Zen
dc.date.available2025-03-21T14:34:24Zen
dc.date.issued2024-07-30en
dc.description.abstractIntroduction: The past year has seen the rise of many variants of large language model chatbots that all attempt to carry out verbal tasks requested by users. These chatbots perform various collaborative tasks, such as brainstorming, question and answering, summarization, and holding other forms of conversations, embedding themwithin our daily society. As these AI assistants become increasingly integrated into societal structures, understanding people’s perceptions toward them offers insights into how to better facilitate that integration, and how different our current understanding of human-human interactions parallels human-AI interactions. This project explores people’s preferences toward responses generated by various chatbots. Methods: Leveraging a comprehensive dataset composed of thousands of pairwise comparisons of responses from 17 popular chatbots, we applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) and property fitting (PROFIT) methodologies to uncover the dimensionality of why some models are similarly or dissimilarly preferred on average by people. Results: In line with previous research on universal dimensions of social cognition, interactions with chatbots are predominantly perceived along two dimensions: warmth and competence. Also similar to social cognition applied to humans, the dimensions displayed a curvilinear trend where the highest levels of default warmth are found in models with moderate levels of competence. Models at extremely high and extremely low levels of competence tended to have lower levels of default warmth. Discussion: This research advances our understanding of the interface between technology and social psychology. As chatbots and AI become increasingly prevalent within societal interactions, we see that many of the same principles found in perceptions between humans can also apply to AI.en
dc.description.sponsorshipVirginia Tech College of Science Data Science Faculty Fellowshipen
dc.format.extent18 pagesen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationHernandez I and Chekili A (2024) The silicon service spectrum: warmth and competence explain people’s preferences for AI assistants. Front. Soc. Psychol. 2:1396533. doi: 10.3389/frsps.2024.1396533en
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2024.1396533en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10919/124904en
dc.identifier.volume2en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherFrontiers Mediaen
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/en
dc.subjectchatboten
dc.subjectwarmthen
dc.subjectcompetenceen
dc.subjectmultidimensional scalingen
dc.subjectartificial intelligenceen
dc.subjectnatural language processingen
dc.titleThe silicon service spectrum: warmth and competence explain people’s preferences for AI assistantsen
dc.title.serialFrontiers in Social Psychologyen
dc.typeArticle - Refereeden
dc.type.dcmitypeTexten

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