AI is the driving force, continuously working on learning all about humans. According to a study, AI can learn to identify flaws in human behaviours and habits and, use them to control human decision-making.
AI has become a part of our daily lives. It is used effectively in the fields as diverse as vaccine development, environmental management and office administration. Although AI is devoid of human-like intelligence and emotions, its skills are robust and quickly expanding with the time.
AI still has a long way to go, and we needn’t worry about machine takeover just yet but proper governance is necessary to prevent misuse.
How AI can learn to influence human behaviour
Researchers have devised a kind of AI system called the recurrent neural network and deep reinforcement-learning, it is a precise method of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the ways people make choices.
The experiments were conducted on humans playing games against a computer. AI was successful about 70 percent of the time as it kept learning the participant’s choice patterns and their preferences. The result was the machine learned to steer participants towards particular actions.
What the research means for the future of AI
There is still a need for research to put AI into action and use them for the benefit of society. But the research helps us in understanding what AI can do and how people make decisions. It points out how AI can steer human decision-making through interactions with us.
The research helps in enhancing behavioural sciences and public policy to improve social welfare by understanding and influencing how people adopt healthy eating habits or renewable energy. AI and ML could be used to recognize people’s vulnerabilities in specific situations and help them to make the best out of bad choices.
This method can be used to defend humans against influence attacks and machines can be taught to alert in cases, for example, by not clicking on some pages, or clicking on others to lay a false trail).
What’s next?
AI needs to be governed to make sure it is implemented responsibly. AI and ML crave data and hence, it’s crucial to ensure we have an effective system in place for data access and governance.
Organizations using and developing AI need to secure they know what are the potential risks and benefits can technologies use or misuse.
