Could Chatbots be a danger as they become too personal?

There is no surprise that today we are surrounded by machines and programs that do our jobs much easier than our capability. Be it performing complex industrial tasks or surfing the internet, modern programming technology has revolutionized all walks of life and business. Chatbots are around us for several years, making their presence in people's daily lives. They are capable of conversing with humans on social media and different digital channels using natural language.

Significantly, chatbots use machine learning systems that are not only taught to respond to queries, but also learn to answer appropriately using probabilistic inference from large data sets with human supervision. These AI-powered conversational agents now have started providing more personal touch, such as booking flights, playing music, and even assisting medical personnel to diagnose severe medical issues.

This personal touch is expected to continue to increase as more and more people are adopting chatbots in their daily lives. Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, and others are already giving answers to users' daily queries and requests like playing music, turning off and on lights, reading news and others, providing more personal experiences. While AI works behind the scenes, many organizations are animated to harness the potential of AI chatbots to interact and engage directly with their customer base.

Human Interaction Influenced by Chatbots

Undoubtedly, using AI chatbots delivers a ton of benefits. But their increased humanization can draw potential dangers that will not lead to the collapse of civilization, but could make a crucial paradigm shift in human forms of interaction and communication. As noted by CMSWire, Liraz Margalit, a digital psychologist, customer & user behavior specialist said that chatbot interactions can have a pessimistic influence on people's other interactions.

According to her, the human brain has an inherent tendency to prefer simplification over complexity. Computer interaction fits this perfectly. Founded on the premise of minimal or constrained social cues, most of which can be summed up in an emoticon, it does not require much cognitive effort. A chatbot doesn't need the emotional involvement and interpretation of nonverbal cues required by humans, thus making people's interaction much easier. This goes hand in hand with the human brain's tendency towards cognitive laziness. Repeated interactions with chatbots create a new mental model that will inform these interactions. It will be experienced as a different state of mind from which people interpret social interactions. Though human interaction via chatbots may be convenient, it can pose problems when people become addicted to this form of bot interaction.

AI Chatbots are not Always Capable of Improvising 

While humans pose a large amount of behavior, many people may act unpredictable behavior when interacting with AI bots. In this regard, AI can find itself in trouble to answer the questions asked erratically. So, here chatbot agents either will have to pass the problem on to a human agent or they will try to make an attempt at it. Moreover, it is very crucial to have human supervision on chatbot software and train appropriately where AI can better deliver answers to any questions in any circumstance.