Paper Number
1068
Paper Type
Completed
Description
Empowered with artificial intelligence, intelligent agents (IAs) increasingly offer help not only in response to user prompts (i.e., user-invoked help) but also without user prompts (i.e., IA-invoked help). Additionally, IAs are becoming more competent and even surpassing users in performing many computational and repetitive tasks. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we investigate users’ acceptance of IA- versus user-invoked help for identity-defining tasks from IAs with different levels of relative competence. We conducted an experiment with 199 software developers and found that IA-invoked (vs. user-invoked) help increases self-threat and thus reduces users’ willingness to accept help from IAs. Moreover, relative competence moderates this effect, in that only IAs having relatively higher (vs. lower or equal) competence cause self-threat. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the self-threatening effects of IA-invoked (vs. user-invoked) help from IAs and the related role of relative competence that crucially shapes effective user-IA collaborations.
Recommended Citation
Adam, Martin; Diebel, Christopher; and Goutier, Marc, "The Threatening Effect of Invoked Help from Highly Competent Intelligent Agents" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/hti/hti/9
The Threatening Effect of Invoked Help from Highly Competent Intelligent Agents
Empowered with artificial intelligence, intelligent agents (IAs) increasingly offer help not only in response to user prompts (i.e., user-invoked help) but also without user prompts (i.e., IA-invoked help). Additionally, IAs are becoming more competent and even surpassing users in performing many computational and repetitive tasks. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we investigate users’ acceptance of IA- versus user-invoked help for identity-defining tasks from IAs with different levels of relative competence. We conducted an experiment with 199 software developers and found that IA-invoked (vs. user-invoked) help increases self-threat and thus reduces users’ willingness to accept help from IAs. Moreover, relative competence moderates this effect, in that only IAs having relatively higher (vs. lower or equal) competence cause self-threat. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the self-threatening effects of IA-invoked (vs. user-invoked) help from IAs and the related role of relative competence that crucially shapes effective user-IA collaborations.
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Comments
09-HCI