TAMPA, Fla. — The University of South Florida has launched its first lab to allow students and faculty members to conduct research on artificial intelligence and study its impact on business.
Rob Hammond, associate professor and director of the Center for Marketing and Business Innovation in the Muma College of Business, oversees the lab.
“AI to me is kind of the same thing as the Internet in 1995, and if you think about what was hot in 1995. It was AOL and Yahoo and Web Crawler and things like that. It was much later that we saw Facebook, Google and Instagram,” Hammond said.
Dr. Jill Schiefelbein is the Chief Experience Officer at Render, a company made up of digital likeness experts.
She completed her doctorate in December at the University of South Florida. She studied behavioral artificial intelligence.
“We need to know if our consumers will be interested in this technology? Can we trust him? Can people learn from this? Will they remember the information? The results of my study show that the answer is absolutely yes,” she said.
She wanted to see if consumers trusted video messages delivered by hyper-realistic avatars. She asked participants to watch a video of her as well as a video of her avatar. She also had them watch a third video which revealed the use of an avatar.
“I took the real me, my avatar and my avatar that said in the first sentence it’s an avatar,” Dr. Schiefelbein said.
She used eye tracking technology and facial expression sensors to monitor participants and their responses as they watched the three videos.
“There was a difference between me, the avatar, and the avatar revealing that it is an avatar. When this was leaked, you could see biometrically, the person’s eyes were moving all over the screen to different parts, whereas in the actual human video and the avatar video, the majority of attention was focused only on faces,” she said.
Dr. Schiefelbein believes that disclosure is crucial. A majority of viewers had a positive response when they were told before watching the video that it would feature an avatar. She said that when the use of the avatar was not previously disclosed, viewers assumed it was actually Dr. Schiefelbein. The response became overwhelmingly negative when they learned it was an avatar of herself.
“How do we know if something is synthetic, and a lot of that is disclosure? Do you disclose that you use synthetic media or AI? The results say yes, you should do it, because if you don’t and people find out, the consequences for your business will be very detrimental,” she said.
Hammond said there are benefits to using artificial intelligence.
“On the one hand, the avatar speaks 28 languages,” he said.
“What if English is not your primary language? As a faculty member, I don’t speak 28 languages. I might be able to speak some Spanish, but I’m not fluent,” he said.
Hammond hopes to expand access to the lab by developing more programs at USF. The Behavioral AI Lab is accessible to researchers on all three campuses.
“As educators, how can we prepare students for the world they will live in? I think that’s our job, and so to bring this technology, to bring this laboratory, to offer this opportunity to our students, to bring them out into it, expose them to it and learn how it works, how it doesn’t work,” he said. -he declares.
