How do employees imagine AI they want to work with: A drawing study

Abstract

Perceptions about AI influence the attribution of characteristics and the interaction with AI. To find out how workers imagine an AI they would like to work with and what characteristics they attribute to it, we asked 174 working individuals to draw an AI they would like to work with, to report five adjectives they associate with their drawing and to evaluate the drawn and three other, typical AI representations (e.g. robot, smartphone) either presented as male or female. Participants mainly drew humanoid or robotic AIs. The adjectives that describe AI mainly referred to the inner characteristics, capabilities, shape, or relationship types. Regarding the evaluation, we identified four dimensions (warmth, competence, animacy, size) that can be reproduced for male and female AIs and different AI representations. This work addresses diverse conceptions of AI in the workplace and shows that human-centered AI development is necessary to address the huge design space.