Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools might soon “covertly influence” users’ decision making in a new commercial frontier called the “intention economy,” University of Cambridge researchers warned in a paper published yesterday.
The research argues the potentially “lucrative yet troubling” marketplace emerging for “digital signals of intent” could, in the near future, influence everything from buying movie tickets to voting for political candidates. Our increasing familiarity with chatbots, digital tutors and other so-called “anthropomorphic” AI agents is helping enable this new array of “persuasive technologies,” it added.
It would see AI combine knowledge of our online habits with a growing ability to know the user and anticipate his or her desires and build “new levels of trust and understanding,” the paper’s two coauthors wrote.
Photo: AFP
Left unchecked, that could allow for “social manipulation on an industrial scale,” the pair, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, argued in the paper published in the Harvard Data Science Review.
It characterizes how this emergent sector — dubbed the “intention economy” — would profile users’ attention and communicative styles and connect them to patterns of behavior and choices they make.
“AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes,” coauthor Yaqub Chaudhary said.
The new AI would rely on so-called “large language models” to target a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, online history, and even preferences for flattery and ingratiation, the research said.
That would be linked with other emerging AI tech that bids to achieve a given aim, such as selling a cinema trip, or steering conversations toward particular platforms, advertisers, businesses and even political organizations.
“Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency,” coauthor Jonnie Penn said.
“It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions,” he added. “We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.”
Penn noted that public awareness of the issue is “the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong path.”
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary