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Artificial intelligence can beat humans at games such as Jeopardy, chess and Go, but these much-celebrated achievements aren’t actually what we need. We want AI to work with us not against us – and the key may be a little banter.
Jacob Crandall at Brigham Young University in Utah and his colleagues created an algorithm capable of learning to cooperate with people that uses short snippets of conversation known as “cheap talk”.
By including chit-chat, the team doubled the rate of cooperation between humans and AI across 472 games. These games were two-player interactions such as the prisoner’s dilemma, where participants repeatedly choose from two options with the outcome dependent on the other player. Success was measured by tracking how frequently players worked together rather than against each other, as well as analysing final scores.
The algorithmic player would say things like