Conferring Minds to Machines: A Deep Learning Approach to Mind Perception, Technology Attachment, and Trust

Bergner et al explore the link between mind perception in cutting-edge humanized AI and downstream consequences on consumer attachment to, trust in, and evaluation of smart objects from unstructured customer review data. They demonstrate that perceiving a mind in an AI-enabled object, such as a voice assistant, predicts customer product ratings, trust perceptions, and consumers' attachment to technology. They also leverage state-of-the-art transfer learning models to extract subtle cues from unstructured text. Furthermore, they develop an automated text classifier and demonstrate the accurate prediction of mind perception from unsolicited, unstructured customer reviews.