UK study warns of perils in AI-driven ‘intention economy’ – Newz9

LONDON: Conversational synthetic intelligence (AI) instruments might quickly “covertly influence” customers’ resolution making in a brand new business frontier known as the “intention economy“, University of Cambridge researchers warned in a paper revealed Monday.
The analysis argues the possibly “lucrative yet troublesome” market rising for “digital signals of intent” may, in the close to future, affect every little thing from shopping for film tickets to voting for political candidates.
Our growing familiarity with chatbots, digital tutors and different so-known as “anthropomorphic” AI brokers helps allow this new array of “persuasive technologies“, it added.
It will see AI mix information of our on-line habits with a rising skill to know the consumer and anticipate his or her wishes and construct “new levels of trust and understanding”, the paper’s two co-authors famous.
Left unchecked, that would permit for “social manipulation on an industrial scale”, the pair, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI), argued in the paper revealed in the Harvard Data Science Review.
It characterizes how this emergent sector — dubbed the “intention economy” — will profile customers’ consideration and communicative types and join them to patterns of conduct and selections they make.
“AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes,” co-writer Yaqub Chaudhary mentioned.
The new AI will depend on so-known as Large Language Models — or LLMs — to focus on a consumer’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, on-line historical past, and even preferences for flattery and ingratiation, based on the analysis.
That could be linked with different rising AI tech that bids to attain a given goal, comparable to promoting a cinema journey, or steer conversations in the direction of specific platforms, advertisers, companies and even political organizations.
Co-author Jonnie Penn warned: “Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency.”
“It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions,” he added.
“We should begin to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.”
Penn famous that public consciousness of the problem is “the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong path”.