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Falling out with AI-buddies: The hidden costs of treating AI as a partner versus servant during service failure

2025· article· en· W4412471414 on OpenAlex
Bo Huang, Sandra Laporte, Sylvain Sénécal, Kamila Sobol

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueTechnological Forecasting and Social Change · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicAI in Service Interactions
Canadian institutionsConcordia UniversityCollège de MaisonneuveHEC Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFalling (accident)ServantService (business)GerontologyBusinessPsychologyOperations managementMedicineNursingComputer scienceEnvironmental healthEconomicsMarketing

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The swift integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools in various industries, such as virtual assistants, chatbots, and service robots, raises inquiries about consumer reactions to these emerging technologies. To promote acceptance and enhance service interactions, companies frequently market these technologies by fostering parasocial and anthropomorphic relationships: the roles of partner and servant are among the most prevalent. Yet, the precise influence these relationship roles have on consumer responses remains uncertain. While extant literature primarily shows a positive effect of treating AI as a partner, in the current research, we find a multifaceted adverse effect of anthropomorphic partner (versus servant) relationships in the context of service failure. Across four studies, the results demonstrate that when consumers perceive an AI assistant as a relational partner, it heightens their inclination to attribute the failure to themselves because of elevated self-expansion perceptions with the AI. Furthermore, within this relationship dynamic, users exhibit reduced intentions of utilizing the AI agent again, as a result of a decreased sense of self-efficacy. Finally, the undesirable effects of a partner relationship following a service failure can be mitigated by drawing attention to the AI's learning capabilites. The findings of our research highlight a potential caveat of an AI-as-partner relationship, thus advancing our understanding of consumer interaction with AI from a relational perspective.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.495
Threshold uncertainty score0.546

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.313
Teacher spread0.239 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it