Should My Agent Lie for Me? A Study on Attitudes of US-basedParticipants Towards Deceptive AI in Selected Future-of-work

Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements might deliver autonomous agents capable of human-like deception. Such capabilities have mostly been negatively perceived in HCI design, as they can have serious ethical implications. However, AI deception might be beneficial in some situations. Previous research has shown that machines designed with some level of dishonesty can elicit increased cooperation with humans. This raises several questions: Are there future-of-work situations where deception by machines can be an acceptable behaviour? Is this different from human deceptive behaviour? How does AI deception influence human trust and the adoption of deceptive machines? In this paper, we describe a user study to answer these questions by considering different contexts and job roles. We report differences and similarities with the perception of humans behaving deceptively in the same roles. Our findings provide insights and lessons that will be crucial in understanding what factors shape the social attitudes and adoption of AI systems that may be required to exhibit dishonest behaviour as part of their jobs.