The media inequality: Comparing the initial human-human and human-AI social interactions

As human-machine communication has yet to become prevalent, the rules of interactions between human and intelligent machines need to be explored. This study aims to investigate a specific question: During human users' initial interactions with artificial intelligence, would they reveal their personality traits and communicative attributes differently from human-human interactions? A sample of 245 participants was recruited to view six targets' twelve conversation transcripts on a social media platform: Half with a chatbot Microsoft's Little Ice, and half with human friends. The findings suggested that when the targets interacted with Little Ice, they demonstrated different personality traits and communication attributes from interacting with humans. Specifically, users tended to be more open, more agreeable, more extroverted, more conscientious and self-disclosing when interacting with humans than with AI. The findings not only echo Mischel's cognitive-affective processing system model but also complement the Computers Are Social Actors Paradigm. Theoretical implications were discussed.