Patients prefer artificial intelligence to a human provider, provided the ai is better than the human: A commentary on longoni, bonezzi and morewedge (2019)

Abstract

We call attention to an important, but overlooked finding in research reported by Longoni, Bonezzi and Morewedge (2019). Longoni et al. claim that people always prefer a human to an artificially intelligent (AI) medical provider. We show that this was only the case when the historical performance of the human and AI providers was equal. When the AI is known to outperform the human, their data showed a clear preference for the automated provider. We provide additional statistical analyses of their data to support this claim.