Computers Are Social Actors
Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R. Tauber
Department of Communication Stanford University
Can Computer Personalities be Human Personalities?
Clifford Nass, Yongeme Moon, B J Fogg, Byron Reeves, D Christopher Dryer
Department of Communication Stanford University
These two articles essentially dealt with the same topic, that is, can computers have human personalities and be social actors? There have been a number of tests done to see if people will respond to computers acting like people and being able to interpret natural language and then respond to the person. The authors are not trying to make a touring test but simply seeing if people will talk to the computers as if they are people. They set up experiments where people interact with machines and see if they regard the machine as if its a person. They then ask the people to talk about and rate the machines on different aspects of personality such as intelligence, passion, knowledge and other aspects of personality. They use these to determine if people are actually regarding the machines as intelligent beings or if they are simply programed responses to different items. They also tried different experiments to see if people regarded male or female voices better and if their interaction with the different gender voice was more or less effective in convincing them it was a person. They tried to determine this by looking at what comprises a personality and what people are looking for when they refer to somethings personality. Again, they look at personalities by looking at a few different factors called dominance factors: able to give orders, talks to others, and takes responsibility. They also look for another set of factors called submissiveness factors which are: easily led, lets others make decisions, diffuses responsibility. They also talk about how, again, it is not simply enough to determine there is a personality but there is also the need to be able to make someone do something with that given personality. Both papers showed about the same results with one paper seeming to contradict the other only in very limited spots. The overall effect was that there was a bit of interaction that we could get out of computers and people did respond to them in some cases.
These articles were rather weird and in some cases misguided. While not directly saying that the other was wrong they did talk about different aspects in the two papers. One paper was focused more on the development of a personality while the other was talking about different aspects of interactions that are displayed. The thing I didn't understand about these papers is that these seem to have more to do with AI then they do with HCI. While this is a direct study of computer human interaction this is also more so a study of natural language processing which has been a study in AI for many years. There have been many programs that can accept natural human language and we have figured out ways for programs to learn and be able to respond to different queries. The best example of this can be seen recently in Watson IBM's new Jeopardy playing computer. He can take in answers from the game and produce the question when asked for my the host. These machines are becoming more and more complex and though progress is slow over the last 50 years there is more getting involved and we are getting closer. HCI from this viewpoint, in my opinion, needs to look at how the interaction takes place and less on what aspects of personality are involved in the interaction. We need to understand how the relationship develops and what makes a person essentially trust a computer actor. Once we do this we will better understand how people perceive computers and we will be able to see them 'evolve' and become more user friendly. This directly involves how we create graphic user interfaces and how people perceive a screen on the computer and better understanding of this will help us to better understand how to design programs.
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