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The effectiveness of teamwork in professional and academic settings often depends on multiple factors, including communication and coordinating attention. In this case, collective attention means that team members can collaboratively focus on the task at hand, optimally divide it into subtasks, and alternate efforts to complete the task as efficiently as possible.
Researchers at Northeastern University recently conducted a study to explore whether introducing artificial intelligence (AI)-based virtual assistants in human teams would affect the team’s collective attention. Their results, previously published in arXiv, showed that using AI-based tools in collaborative groups can significantly affect what team members discuss and how they discuss it.
“Artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in the way we work in the future,” Christoph Riedl, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Research has been investigating how a person works with an artificial intelligence system for some time. But few studies have focused on how entire teams work with artificial intelligence systems.”
The main goal of recent research by Riedl and his colleagues is to better understand how the presence of artificial intelligence assistance will affect team collaboration. However, they did not just focus on the dynamics between artificial intelligence and individual human beings, but instead looked at the impact of artificial intelligence on the dynamics among all team members, including the dynamics between people.
“We conducted a laboratory experiment in which groups of 3-4 people had to solve a difficult puzzle task,” Riedl said. “To help them, they found artificial intelligence assistants. During the experiment, the artificial intelligence assistant gave the team some clues on how to solve the problem. We recorded team communication and looked for changes in team communication patterns before and after the AI assistant sent out clues.”
To investigate whether team communication was affected by the presence of artificial intelligence agents, the researchers carefully transcribed records of all conversations between team members. They also recorded the general topics discussed at different times and the specific words used.
“We found two interesting things,” Riddle explained. “First of all, the team is strongly influenced by the artificial intelligence assistant in what they talk about. Once the AI assistant introduces a new idea, people immediately jump on and talk about the new idea, even if it’s a low-quality clue, it won’t affect it.” Secondly, we observed that people in the team adopted the language used by the artificial intelligence assistant.”
Experiments conducted by Riedl and his colleagues showed that when used in group work, it can influence what human team members discuss and the specific terminology used. For example, researchers found that when they solved the problem used in the experiment, some team members initially called specific symbols “diamonds,” but after the artificial intelligence assistant did so, they began calling them “gems.”
Interestingly, this language adaptation process seems to be automatic and will occur regardless of how participants feel about the AI assistant. For example, some teams have begun using the same language as AI, even if they express distrust of it and doubt its capabilities.
“I think the most significant impact of these findings is that when artificial intelligence systems are introduced, there can be various unexpected consequences,” Riedel said.
“In our case, the AI system was designed to improve team performance through the clues it provided, but in addition to the expected goals, the system subtly changed the team’s collective attention and the language the team uses. Some of these effects may have positive effects-such as improving cognitive consistency among human team members, but others may have negative effects, such as diverting attention away from the aspects most relevant to the task.”
The research team’s recent work highlights the complex chain reactions that can occur when introducing artificial intelligence systems in professional and collaborative environments. Although predicting how AI will affect the people who interact with it is a very difficult goal, Riedl and his colleagues plan to continue studying the impact of these systems in a variety of environments.
“Our research shows that adopting a collective intelligence perspective and building on existing collective intelligence research can provide artificial intelligence researchers with an important baseline understanding of group dynamics,” Riddle added.
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Original text:https://techxplore.com/news/2024-08-ai-impacts-attention-teams.html
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