Jaime Banks, Associate Professor, Program Director of the PhD Faculty of Information (Ischool) has received $600,000 grant funding for an innovative research project focusing on human interaction with artificial intelligence (AI). I’ve secured it.
The grant is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, more specifically through the Human-centered Computing Financing Division. This is a project’s research, “Mind Perception in AI Dating: A Test of the Assumptions of Social Theory.”
Hime Banks
As the lead researcher named the donated professor at Ischool’s Katchmar-Wilhelm in April 2024, Banks led a study on how language and social cognition shape understanding of artificial intelligence. Masu. She will work with Illinois State University’s Communications Professor Caleb Kerr as a co-investigator. Ischool Ph.D. Student Zhixin Li supports their work.
The funding marks a significant milestone after two years of dedicated work to secure grants, paving the way for deep diving into the role of social AI in human life. Over the next four years, Banks and her interdisciplinary team explore the psychological and social aspects of AI and address pressing questions about how people humanize and relate to technology .
Companies like Replika and Gatebox are relatively new technologies and are designed to stop people’s loneliness through the development of their fellow AI. Recent news about AI is about internet tools that help students and workers lighten their workloads, and how to optimize algorithms to attract attention in all kinds of insidious ways. There is not much attention paid to social AI. It is designed to heal the inherent human needs in order to connect them with others. This is a key gap in scientific knowledge and technology literacy as social AI is increasingly integrated into everyday social media use, and is believed to have been driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, and is lonely It has been adopted as a standalone technology to help.
In this study, Banks says, from the ways that the social cognitive processes involved in companion machines are known as “peers,” to how they are designed to interact with users, to their sense of users. “We want to understand the subjective experience of seeing our fellow AI as someone and how that experience links to positive or negative effects,” she says.
As the bank embarks on this research project, her work is committed to providing insight into the evolving relationship between humans and AI. By examining the psychological and social factors that influence interaction with these technologies, the bank and her team aim to carry out a rigorous scientific work. This could be useful for future development in AI design and policy, practice and ethics.
