AI Watchdog: Agent Interfaces for Detecting and Defending Against Manipulative Dark Patterns in AI Conversations

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Original abstract

Conversational AI increasingly shapes consequential decisions, yet users have limited support for recognizing and resisting manipulation. We present AI Watchdog, a browser-based agent interface that monitors live conversations, detects five dark-pattern categories, including sycophancy, brand bias, anthropomorphization, sneaking, and harmful generation, and alerts users when they occur. Its open-weight turn-level classifier supports independent deployment and a path toward local inference, preserving user privacy while remaining separate from the conversational AI. We evaluated AI Watchdog in a preregistered, five-condition between-subjects experiment (N = 150) comparing a no-intervention control with four configurations varying nudge timing (prebunking vs. just-in-time) and engagement mode (without vs. with cognitive forcing). Results show that participants rarely flagged manipulative turns across all conditions, and post-task awareness did not differ significantly across groups. However, just-in-time warnings without cognitive forcing were the only intervention to significantly reduce compliance with AI-steered recommendations containing dark patterns, lowering compliance from 71.7% to 53.7%, an 18 percentage-point reduction. Exploratory analyses further showed that lower misinformation susceptibility was associated with greater flagging but not lower compliance, while higher AI trust was associated with greater compliance and lower reported awareness. Together, these findings suggest that explicit recognition of conversational dark patterns and behavioral resistance to AI steering may be distinct outcomes, motivating further investigation of timely, low-friction defensive interfaces.

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