The moral accountability of a personified agent: young adults' conceptions

This paper describes the preliminary results of a study conducted to answer the question: Do users attribute moral accountability to personified agent technologies? A pilot study was conducted in which 20 college students interacted with a personified agent, were insulted by the agent, and observed a researcher interacting and insulting the same agent. A semistructured interview was conducted to investigate the participants' judgments of the observed interactions. Results suggest that most users will hold a designer, programmer or creator responsible for moral violations enacted by the personified agent, rather than attributing accountability to the agent itself. Keywords Moral accountability, personified software agent, social computing, user-centered design. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2.q Information interfaces and Representation: User Interfaces ? User-centered design

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Nathan G. Freier, Elia J. Nelson, Amanda Rotondo, Wai Kay Kong
• Keywords: Agent Technologies, CHI 2009, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Moral Accountability, Personified Agent