Who Wrote this? How Smart Replies Impact Language and Agency in the Workplace

10/07/2022

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by   Kilian Wenker, et al.

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AI-mediated communication is designed to help us do our work more quickly and efficiently. But does it come at a cost? This study uses smart replies (SRs) to show how AI influences humans without any intent on the part of the developer - the very use of AI is sufficient. I propose a loss of agency theory as a viable approach for studying the impact of AI on human agency. I use mixed methods involving a crowdsourced experiment to test the theory and qualitative interviews to elucidate non-use of AI. My quantitative results reveal that machine agency affects the content we author and the behavior we generate. But it is a non-zero-sum game.