@inproceedings{7b1e20fd6fad4f7099463daa9318e8d5,
title = "A Cautionary Tale About AI-Generated Goal Suggestions",
abstract = "Setting the right goals and prioritizing them might be the most crucial and the most challenging type of decisions people make for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. In this article, we explore whether it might be possible to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help people set better goals and which potential problems might arise from such applications. We devised the first prototype of an AI-powered digital goal-setting assistant and a rigorous empirical paradigm for assessing the quality of AI-generated goal suggestions. Our empirical paradigm compares the AI-generated goal suggestions against randomly-generated goal suggestions and unassisted goal-setting on a battery of self-report measures of important goal characteristics, motivation, and usability in a large-scale repeated-measures online experiment. The results of an online experiment with 259 participants revealed that our intuitively compelling goal suggestion algorithm was actively harmful to the quality of the people's goals and their motivation to pursue them. These surprising findings highlight three crucial problems to be tackled by future work on leveraging AI to help people set better goals: i) aligning the objective function of the AI algorithms with the design goals, ii) helping people quantify how valuable different goals are to them, and iii) preserving the user's sense of autonomy.",
keywords = "AI alignment, goal-setting, prioritization, productivity tools",
author = "Falk Lieder and Chen, {Pin Zhen} and Jugoslav Stojcheski and Saksham Consul and Viktoria Pammer-Schindler",
note = "Funding Information: This research was supported by grant number 1757269 from the National Science Foundation. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 Owner/Author.; Mensch und Computer Conference 2022 : Facing Realities, MuC 2022 ; Conference date: 04-09-2022 Through 07-09-2022",
year = "2022",
month = sep,
day = "4",
doi = "10.1145/3543758.3547539",
language = "English",
series = "ACM International Conference Proceeding Series",
publisher = "Association of Computing Machinery",
pages = "354--359",
editor = "Max Muhlhauser and Christian Reuter and Bastian Pfleging and Thomas Kosch and Andrii Matviienko and Kathrin Gerling and Sven Mayer and Wilko Heuten and Tanja Doring",
booktitle = "Mensch und Computer 2022",
address = "United States",
}