Study finds human-AI personality pairings change ad quality in field experiment

Harang Ju of Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School and Sinan Aral of the MIT Sloan School of Management paired 1,258 participants with AI agents prompted to display varying levels of the five personality traits used in standard psychology inventories. The teams produced 7,266 display advertisements for a think tank, which 1,168 independent raters scored. The advertisements were then run on X, where the paper says they drew roughly 5 million impressions.

The highest-rated work came from extraverted people working with extraverted agents, conscientious people with conscientious agents, and open people with conscientious agents, the authors report. Combinations of extraverted people with conscientious agents, conscientious people with agreeable agents, and anxious people with conscientious agents scored lower. Tech Xplore reported that stronger advertisement text raised click-through rates by about 7 percent and cut cost per click by roughly 30 cents in the field test. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 2 and is also posted as a preprint.