Voice in the Machine: Ethical Considerations for Language-Capable Robots
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Parsing the promise of language-capable robots.
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Language-capable robots' speech reflects a set of implicit values, virtues, preferences, and politics.
“These concerns are further magnified for the language-capable robots centered in much HRI research, whose speech itself reflects a set of implicit values, virtues, preferences, and politics [65].”
From Robots for Social Justice (R4SJ): Toward a More Equitable Practice of Human-Robot Interaction (2024) · cites this paper as [65]
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Cites
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922 · Cited by 6,988 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…as smart speakers (such as encoding and perpetuation of hegemonically dominant white heteropatriarchal stereotypes, norms, and biases 6 and climate risks), 1 but they also present fundamentally new and accentuated risks that stem from the confluence of their communicative capability and embodiment.”
BackgroundLanguage-Capable Robots may Inadvertently Weaken Human Moral Norms
Jackson, R. B., & Williams, T. (2019) · 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) · doi:10.1109/hri.2019.8673123 · Cited by 64 · see citing works
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Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Browne, S. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press. 2015.
- Costanza-Chock, S. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. 2020.
- Lucena, J.C. and Leydens, J.A. Engineering Justice: Transforming Engineering Education and Practice. Wiley. 2018.
- Noble, S.U. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press. 2018.
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Robots for Social Justice (R4SJ): Toward a More Equitable Practice of Human-Robot Interaction
Zhu, Y., Wen, R., & Williams, T. (2024) · Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction · doi:10.1145/3610977.3634944 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Williams, T., Matuszek, C., Jokinen, K., Korpan, R., Pustejovsky, J., & Scassellati, B.
- Affiliations
- Colorado School of Mines (US)
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County (US)
- Artificial Intelligence Research Center (JP)
- Iona College (US)
- Brandeis University (US)
- Yale University (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 2023-07-25
- Volume
- 66
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 20-23
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W4385231846
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 3
- FWCI
- 2.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Communications of the ACM (publishedVersion)
- Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (USMAI Consortium) (submittedVersion)
- Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (University of Maryland College Park)
- Funders
- AFOSR (FA9550-20-1-0089)
- New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan (JPNP20006)
- NSF (IIS-2024878,IIS-2145642,DRL-2019805,1955653)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Keywords
- ethical considerations, human-robot interaction, chatbots, AI ethics
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