Using machine learning to investigate consumers' emotions: the spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' emotional responses to artificial intelligence (AI) defeating people. Meanwhile, the authors investigate the negative spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies. The authors also try to alleviate this spillover effect.
Design/methodology/approach
Using four studies to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors use the fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from the Transformers algorithm to run a sentiment analysis to investigate how AI defeating people influences consumers' emotions. In Studies 2 to 4, the authors test the effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes, the mediating effect of negative emotions and the moderating effect of different intentions.
Findings
The authors find that AI defeating people increases consumers' negative emotions. In terms of downstream consequences, AI defeating people induces a spillover effect on consumers' unfavorable attitudes toward AI companies. Emphasizing the intention of helping people can effectively mitigate this negative spillover effect.
Practical implications
The authors' findings remind governments, policymakers and AI companies to pay attention to the negative effect of AI defeating people and take reasonable steps to alleviate this negative effect. The authors help consumers rationally understand this phenomenon and correctly control and reduce unnecessary negative emotions in the AI era.
Originality/value
This paper is the first study to examine the adverse effects of AI defeating humans. The authors contribute to research on the dark side of AI, the outcomes of competition matches and the method to analyze emotions in user-generated content (UGC).
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editor-in-chief, the associate editor, the editorial office, anonymous referees, Professor Zhilin Yang, Ying Teng, Xingyu Wang and Jun Yin for their constructive comments. The authors are also grateful to seminar participants at the 2021 China Marketing International Conference. The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos: 72202149, 71672063 and 72072065) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No: 2022ZY-SX004). The computation is completed in the high performance computing platform of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Citation
Ma, Y.M., Dai, X. and Deng, Z. (2023), "Using machine learning to investigate consumers' emotions: the spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies", Internet Research, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-02-2022-0113
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited