UK study warns of perils in AI-driven ‘intention economy’

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools may soon “covertly influence” users’ decision making in a new commercial frontier called the “intention economy”, University of Cambridge researchers warned in a paper published Monday.

The research argues the potentially “lucrative yet troubling” marketplace emerging for “digital signals of intent” could, in the near future, influence everything from buying movie tickets to voting for political candidates.

Our increasing familiarity with chatbots, digital tutors and other so-called “anthropomorphic” AI agents is helping enable this new array of “persuasive technologies”, it added.

It will see AI combine knowledge of our online habits with a growing ability to know the user and anticipate his or her desires and build “new levels of trust and understanding”, the paper’s two co-authors noted.

Left unchecked, that could allow for “social manipulation on an industrial scale”, the pair, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI), argued in the paper published in the Harvard Data Science Review.