Rethinking personhood and agency: how AI challenges human-centered concepts

TL;DR

This paper explores how humans attribute human-like qualities to AI and suggests psychology should focus on how this affects human experience and responsibility.

Contribution

The paper introduces a three-lens framework to guide psychological research on human-AI interactions and emphasizes an experience-focused approach.

Findings

Humans increasingly attribute intention and emotion to AI systems.

Psychology should focus on lived experiences of agency and personhood in human-AI interactions.

A three-lens framework is proposed to advance psychological research in this area.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly display behaviors once thought to be exclusively human, prompting people to attribute intention, emotion, and even moral responsibility to these agents. This philosophical perspective examines how psychology understand and respond to these developments in human-AI interaction: How and why do humans perceive and attribute personhood and agency to AI systems, what are the personal and social consequences of doing so, and what are the implications for psychology as a discipline? We thus advocate that psychology adopt an experience-focused approach to human-AI interactions, drawing primarily on psychological research related to the sense of agency and related aspects of self-experience. From this discussion, we develop a three-lens framework (explanatory, normative, and cultural) as a guide for advancing psychological research and practices related to human-AI interactions. We propose that psychology’s distinctive contribution in the age of AI is to analyze how concepts of agency and personhood function in lived human experience, particularly in shaping perceptions of control and responsibility regarding AI systems.