There is Alexa sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for your next query. But before she tells you how to make a perfect avocado salad, would you like to know something about the person who invented her?

As the use of automated assistants and other AI agents becomes more pervasive, how humans interact with them is increasingly a subject of debate and research. Now, a new study reveals that when people think about the humans who create these tools, they view the robots’ work as more authentic.

The study was conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Glenn R. Carroll, his University of Washington colleague Arthur S. Jago, and Mariana Lin, a writer and poet (and Stanford d.school lecturer) who helped create the voice of Apple’s Siri. Their paper was published in March 2022 by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

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