CITP Seminar: Jeremy Foote - LLMs are Social Actors: Chatbots in the Social World

While researchers have long noted that people anthropomorphize computers, LLM-based chatbots represent a qualitative shift; they are the first technology that can engage in genuinely human-like conversations. In this talk, Jeremy Foote will discuss how the ongoing integration of LLMs into our social worlds is creating new risks and opportunities, using findings from recent work done by his group as examples.

His first project argues that companion AI like Replika introduce new privacy risks, because strong interpersonal relationships often rely on the sharing of personal secrets. Interviews with chatbot users find that they often employ heuristics based in interpersonal communication when deciding what to share, but also engage in fairly sophisticated strategies to safeguard private information from AI companies.

The second project considers how the social nature of chatbots can be used for good. This project invited users who had posted toxic content on Reddit to engage in a conversational intervention with a chatbot designed to elicit self-reflection. Results show that people are willing to engage with chatbots, often in good faith, but these conversations did not cause a measurable change in toxic behavior. The results suggest best practices for designing rehabilitative bots, as well as other opportunities for integrating helpful AI agents.

Bio:

Jeremy Foote is an assistant professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University and a faculty member in the Community Data Science Collective, an interdisciplinary, multi-university research group studying online communities. Foote’s research uses (mostly) computational methods to examine the factors that influence which communities gain attention and membership, exploring how individual decisions create group-level outcomes like longevity and shared identity. His recent work explores how AI agents can be integrated into online community processes to build safer, healthier communities. Foote received his Ph.D. from the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His work has been published in top social science and computer science venues, and has received awards from the International Communication Association and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Co-operative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).

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