- After swearing at a chatbot, people are likely to leave negative word-of-mouth feedback
- But people are less likely to leave negative feedback after swearing at a realistic AI video avatar
- The milder negative feedback suggests a cathartic effect from telling off something that looks human, a researcher says
NVIDIA GTC AI CONFERENCE, SAN JOSE — Dealing with customer service bots can be frustrating. But dealing with so-called "digital humans" — realistic, AI video avatars — is seemingly less frustrating than dealing with chatbots, according to research highlighted at Nvidia's GTC event this week.
"We did a study where we deliberately pissed off the users," Alan Dennis, a professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, said during a panel on how AI agents and digital humans are shaping the future of interactions in telecoms. The study in question measured the strong language test subjects used when frustrated by interactions with bots vs. digital humans.
"The chatbot deliberately made mistakes," he continued. "And users got really angry. Ten percent of our users who interacted with the chatbot used profanity — very strong profanity — those seven words I'm not allowed to say. You know the words."
"We found, yeah, about 10% of users also swore at the digital human, but not one used those seven words," Dennis said. Instead, they said "you' stupid thing" and other relatively mild comments.
People who got angry and swore at the chatbot were more likely to leave negative word of mouth, whereas those swearing at the digital human were less likely to leave negative word of mouth. The takeaway?
"It was almost as though swearing at something that looked like a human was cathartic, and you got it out and moved on," Dennis said.
The panel discussion yielded many meaty insights about the future of digital humans and agentic AI in telco customer service and network operations, which we will explore in forthcoming stories. But we thought this little tidbit was too good to hold back because it was so gosh-darn interesting.
Catch all our content from this year's GTC conference here.