Former trainee at the Norwegian Seafood Council, PhD candidate Sigurd Birk Hansen, talks about the consumer response to AI.
Don’t forget the people
Sigurd Birk Hansen
PhD candidate
From Psychology to Marketing
When Sigurd Birk Hansen first moved from Lofoten to Tromsø to study, his plan was to go into psychology. He quickly ‘found out that I should not become a psychologist’ – in practice at least.
What he did discover was an interest in ‘what motivates people’s behaviour,’ he explains. Switching to marketing, first for an undergraduate and then a post-graduate degree, Sigurd wrote his master's thesis on ‘How controversial brand activism affects consumer behaviour’.
After completing his masters’ degree, Sigurd served as a marketing trainee at the Norwegian Seafood Council and also secured 1 mn NOK in Research Council funding to start his own travel tech company. ‘It was a hectic year,’ he says.
Photo: Knut Åserud
Researching Consumer Responses to AI
Photo: Sigurd Birk Hansen
Researching Consumer Responses to AI
Today, he is taking his research even further as a PhD student in the sustainable marketing group at the School of Business and Economics at UiT, where he is researching consumer responses to AI.
‘My focus is how consumers respond to products, communication or marketing that contains some form of artificial intelligence,’ he explains. That’s the layman’s version of what he does of course. In practice, his studies focus in on a framework called AI aversion.
‘There is a phenomenon where, if someone is told that an algorithm is behind a decision or something is AI-generated, even if the product or service is exactly the same, they will avoid it,’ says Sigurd.
This phenomenon applies even where AI performs better than a human, he adds. ‘People will often still prefer something made by humans.’
Triggers around Creativity
Sigurd is looking at the psychological reasons behind this response: what triggers it, how it can be minimised. By using quantitative experiments to gather data and regression analyses, he looks at, in particular, he looks at how consumers perceive the ‘creativity’ of AI
And where does seafood come into all this? Sigurd stresses that this is not his area of expertise but he also notes the exciting potential in the sector.
‘The seafood industry has a lot of data from monitoring, cameras and new technological solutions,’ he says. ‘With the right investments, AI can do many jobs that perhaps humans should not do: analysing video recordings inside cages perhaps, following each individual salmon.’
Don’t Forget the People
And he has some advice for those in the industry exploring the use of AI in seafood. ‘It may sound a bit cheesy,’ says Sigurd, ‘but don’t forget the people’.
This is about labeling and responsible use but also about managing AI aversion: ‘Bringing out the human experts involved in the process is important,’ he stresses, adding that people are more accepting of AI when you communicate that human involvement.
We Forgive Humans, not AI
He also warns that AI should not be too heavily relied upon. ‘These tools still make a lot of mistakes and if AI makes a mistake, we dislike it more than if a human makes a mistake.’
Essentially, consumers are more forgiving of human mistakes, less so when that mistake was made by a bot. Finally, he says we need to ‘remember that there are still people using Windows 95. AI adoption happens quickly in some places, but that does not mean that the whole world changes in a few years.’
