You may want to think twice the next time you consider letting your phone finish your sentence. Research from Cornell Tech has found that the AI-powered autocomplete suggestions that you get when you’re typing on your phone could actually be affecting the way you think.
To conduct their research, the team asked more than 2,500 participants to write short essays on controversial societal topics like fracking, voting rights for felons, etc. Some of them were given autocomplete suggestions during their writing that were designed to lean toward a certain opinion, while others received no suggestions.
The results found that the participants who were given the biased suggestions began coming around to those ideas. Even when the team told some of them at the beginning that the AI suggestions were biased, or when they informed others afterward, “their attitudes about the issues still shifted,” said Mor Naaman, a senior author on the study.
