An echoborg is a person whose words and actions are determined, in whole or in part, by an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

(AI). The term "echoborg" was coined by social psychologists Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespie, whose research at the

London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public university, public research university located in London, England and a constituent college of the federal University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidn ...

explored unscripted face-to-face social encounters between research participants and confederates whose words were covertly supplied by rudimentary AIs known as “

chat bot A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...

s" and vocalized via

speech shadowing Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce spee ...

. The idea is derivative of the

cyranoid Cyranoids are "people who do not speak thoughts originating in their own central nervous system: Rather, the words they speak originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid by radio transmission". Background The ...

concept that originated with Stanley Milgram. The “echoborg method” allows one to investigate how people behave and make attributions toward an AI (or more precisely, a human-AI “hybrid”) when their psychological state is fully primed for human-human interaction. Other forms of human-AI interaction (e.g., computer-mediated conversation) involve a machine interface, anthropomorphic analog, or a

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...

layer through which a person communicates with an AI, and these forms of mediation fundamentally alter the

intersubjective In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives. Definition is a term coined by social scientists to refer to a variety of types of human inter ...

relationship between the human and artificial agents party to an interaction. The echoborg concept has been explored in

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

as commentary on the increasing ubiquitousness of AI and its contribution to human culture, as well as people's dependency on various types of AI (e.g., GPS navigation systems) for carrying out mundane social tasks.Copestake, J., Gillespie, A., & Corti, K. (2016)
How artificial intelligence will change humanity
erformance art BBC Future World Changing Ideas Summit 2016, Sydney, Australia.

References

{{Reflist Group processes Psychology experiments

See also

References