Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We conducted two investigations to capture how people perceive the artificial agents introduced into Paul A. Weiss's thought experiment, especially, how they perceived the AI system or the robots that are relatively new technology for us with different description (abstracted or concrete). As a result, we confirmed the followings: 1) generative and conversational AIs were perceived concretely as indispensable tools for our daily live with learning function while AI system was perceived abstractly as having knowledge from past, and 2) even the same robots, cleaner robots was concretely perceived as an useful tool while humanoid was abstractedly as ambiguous entity. Here, the presence or absence of appropriate knowledge with the agents may have led to the different ways of perceptions of agents. Thus, the introducing the agents into Paul A. Weiss thought experiment is an effective methodology to comprehend the users' current perception of these agents.