The Madmen and the AIs

In Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance Harang Ju and Sinan Aral (both at MIT) paired humans and AIs in a set of marketing tasks to generate some 11,138 ads for a large think tank. The basic story is that working with the AIs increased productivity substantially. Important, but not surprising. But here is where it gets wild:

[W]e manipulated the Big Five personality traits for each AI, independently setting them to high or low levels using P2 prompting (Jiang et al., 2023). This allows us to systematically investigate how AI personality traits influence collaborative work and whether there is heterogeneity in their effects based on the personality traits of the human collaborators, as measured through a pre-task survey.

In other words, they created AIs which were high and low on the “big 5” OCEAN metrics, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and then they paired the different AIs with humans who were also rated on the big-5.

The results were quite amusing. For example, a neurotic AI tended to make a lot more copy edits unless paired with an agreeable human.

AI Alex: What do you think of this edit I made to the copy? Do you think it is any good?

Agreeable Alex: It’s great!

AI Alex: Really? Do you want me to try something else?

Agreeable Alex: Nah, let’s go with it!

AI Alex: Ok. 🙂

Similarly, if a highly conscientiousness AI and a highly conscientiousness human were paired together they exchanged a lot more messages.

It’s hard to generalize from one study to know exactly which AI-human teams will work best but we all know some teams just work better–every team needs a booster and a sceptic, for example– and the fact that we can manipulate AI personalities to match them with humans and even change the AI personalities over time suggests that AIs can improve productivity in ways going beyond the ability of the AI to complete a task.

Hat tip: John Horton.

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