Human-AI Collaboration in a Cooperative Game Setting: Measuring Social Perception and Outcomes

Human-AI interaction is pervasive across many areas of our day to day lives. In this paper, we investigate human-AI collaboration in the context of an AI-driven word association game. In our experiments, we test various dimensions of subjective social perceptions (rapport, intelligence, creativity and likeability) of participants towards their partners when participants believe they are playing with an AI or with a human. We also test subjective social perceptions of participants towards their partners when participants are presented with a variety of confidence levels. We ran a large scale study on Mechanical Turk (n=164) of this collaborative game. Our results show that when participants believe their partners were human, they found their partners to be more likeable, intelligent, creative and having more rapport and more use positive words to describe their partner's attributes. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative findings, we discuss AI agent transparency, include design implications for tools incorporating or supporting human-AI collaboration, and lay out directions for future research. Our findings lead to implications for other forms of human-AI interaction and communication.