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Advances in professional communications
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21595899 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Burton Swanson (0000-0002-1602-407X, University of California, Los Angeles, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1543-1553 |
| Publication date | 2020-10-10 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Information Technology and People (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0959-3845 • E-ISSN: 1758-5813 |
| Publisher | Emerald (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1108/itp-06-2019-0311 |
| OpenAlex | W3046881189 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Purpose This viewpoint paper calls in to question the current design approach to personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistance in support of everyday professional communications, where a bot emulates a human in this role. It aims to stimulate fresh thought among designers and users of this technology. It also calls upon scholars to more widely share incidental insights that arise in their own encounters with such new AI. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a case of an email exchange gone wrong to demonstrate the current failings of personal AI assistance in support of professional communications and to yield broader insights into bot design and use. The viewpoint is intended to provoke discussion. Findings From the case, it is indicated that industrial-strength personal AI assistance is not here yet. Designing a personal AI assistant to emulate a human is found to be deeply problematic, in particular. The case illuminates what might be called the problem of blinded agency, in performative contexts where human, robotic and organizational identities are at least partially masked and actions, inactions and intentions can too easily disappear in a thick fog of digital exchange. The problem arises where parties must act in contexts not known to each other, and where who is responsible for what in a mundane exchange is obscured (intentionally or not) by design or by actions (or inactions) of the parties. An insight is that while humans act with a sense of agency to affect outcomes that naturally invoke a corresponding sense of responsibility for what transpires, bots in social interaction simply act and feign responsibility as they have no sense of it beyond their code and data. A personal AI assistant is probably best designed to communicate its artificiality clearly. Missing today are distinctive social conventions for identifying machine agency in everyday interactions as well as an accepted etiquette for AI deployment in these settings. Originality/value As a viewpoint contribution, the paper's value is as a stimulant to discussion of alternate approaches to design and use of personal AI assistance in professional communications and where we should be going with this. The presented case of an email exchange gone wrong is simple on the face of it but reveals in its examination a number of complexities and broader insights
Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Internet privacy · Knowledge management · Performative utterance · Political science · Public relations · Sense of agency · Sociology · Computer Science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Engineering · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |