TAMPA, Fla. — The University of South Florida 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 of Marketing and Sales Innovation in the Muma College of Business, oversees the lab.
“The way I think about it is AI is kind of where the Internet was 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 before we saw Facebook, Google, and Instagram,” said Hammond.
Dr. Jill Schiefelbein is a Chief Experience Officer with Render, a company with digital likeness experts.
She completed her doctorate in December at the University of South Florida. She studied behavioral artificial intelligence.
“We need to know, will our consumers engage with this technology? Can it be trusted? Can people learn from it? Will they remember information? The results of my study show the answer is absolutely, yes,” she said.
She wanted to see if consumers trust video messages delivered by hyper-realistic avatars. She asked participants to watch a video of her and a video of her avatar. She also had them watch a third video which disclosed the use of an avatar.
“I took the real me, the avatar of me and the avatar of me that said in the first sentence it is an avatar,” said Dr. Schiefelbein.
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 that discloses it’s an avatar. When it’s disclosed, you could see biometrically, the person’s eyes were moving all over the screen to different portions, whereas in the real human video and the avatar video, the majority of attention was focused just on the faces,” she said.
Dr. Schiefelbein found that disclosure is crucial. A majority of viewers had a positive response when they were told in advance of watching the video that it would feature an avatar. She said when the use of the avatar was not disclosed beforehand, the viewers were left assuming 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 big part of that is disclosure? Do you disclose you’re using synthetic media or AI? The results say, yes, you should because if you don’t and people find out, the consequences to your business are very damaging,” she said.
Hammond said there are benefits to using artificial intelligence.
“For one, the avatar speaks 28 languages,” he said.
“What if English isn’t your primary language? As a faculty member, I don’t speak 28 languages. I might be able to get through 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 available to researchers from all three campuses.
“As educators, how do we get students ready for the world they’re going to live in? I think that’s our job, and so bringing this technology, bringing this lab, bringing this opportunity to our students, emerging them in it, getting them exposed to it and learning how it works, how it doesn’t work,” he said.
