Christoph Bartneck

University of Canterbury | UC · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Online questionnaires that use crowd-sourcing platforms to recruit participants have become commonplace, due to their ease of use and low costs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Large Language Models (LLM) have made it easy for bad actors to automatically fill in online forms, including generating meaningful text for open-ended tasks. These techn...

Theories are an integral part of the scientific endeavour. The target article proposes interesting ideas for a theory on human-robot interaction but lacks specificity that would enable us to properly test this theory. No empirical data are yet available to determine its predictive power.

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in our society has sparked many hopes and fears, with people having diverging views on the need to strictly regulate AI. The current study investigates how demographic and personality traits are associated with a desire to strictly regulate AI using a representative sample of adults from New Zealand (N =...

The Godspeed Questionnaire Series (GQS) is one of the most highly cited and used questionnaire in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Agent Interaction. Since its inception in 2009, it has been translated into 19 languages. In this chapter, we discuss the history and development of the GQS as well its psychometric properties. For the fir...

The constantly rising demand for human-like conversational agentsand the accelerated development of natural language processingtechnology raise expectations for a breakthrough in intelligent ma-chine research and development. However, measuring intelligenceis impossible without a proper test. Alan Turing proposed a test formachine intelligence base...

Recent research suggests that implicit self-theories—a theory predicated on the idea that people’s underlying beliefs about whether self-attributes, such as intelligence, are malleable (incremental theory) or unchangeable (entity theory), can influence people’s perceptions of emerging social robots developed for everyday use. Other avenues of resea...

Robots that are capable of outperforming human beings on mental and physical tasks provoke perceptions of threat. In this article we propose that implicit self-theory (core beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes, such as intelligence) is a determinant of whether one person experiences threat perception to a greater degree than another. W...

Mind perception is a fundamental part of anthropomorphism and has recently been suggested to be a dual process. The current research studied the influence of implicit and explicit mind perception on a robot’s right to be protected from abuse, both in terms of participants condemning abuse that befell the robot as well as in terms of participants’ t...

Understanding people’s perceptions and inferences about social robots and, thus, their responses toward them, constitutes one of the most pervasive research themes in the field of Human–Robot interaction today. We herein augment and extend this line of work by investigating, for the first time, the novel proposition that one’s implicit self-theory...

In human-chatbot interaction, users casually and regularly offend and abuse the chatbot they are interacting with. The current paper explores the relationship between chatbot humanlikeness on the one hand and sexual advances and verbal aggression by the user on the other hand. 283 conversations between the Cleverbot chatbot and its users were harve...

Among of the factors that affect likeability, reciprocal response towards the other party is one of the multiple variables involved in social interaction. However, in HRI, likeability is constrained to robot behavior, since mass-produced robots will have identical physical embodiment. A reciprocal robot response is desirable in order to design robo...

Robots in Education is an accessible introduction to the use of robotics in formal learning, encompassing pedagogical and psychological theories as well as implementation in curricula. Today, a variety of communities across education are increasingly using robots as general classroom tutors, tools in STEM projects, and subjects of study. This volum...

There have been multiple incidents where humans attacked robots in a public environment (Brscić et al., in: Proceedings of the international conference on human–robot interaction, ACM/IEEE, Portland, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696468); Vincent, in: A drunk man was arrested for knocking over Silicon Valley’s crime-fighting robot, 2017, h...

In this chapter we discuss the different definitions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We then discuss how machines learn and how a robot works in general. Finally we discuss the limitations of AI and the influence the media has on our preconceptions of AI.

This chapter describes what autonomous vehicles are and how they work. We then discuss the associated risks and benefits not only from an ethical perspective, but also from a legal and environmental view. Core issues discussed are liability and safety of autonomous vehicles.

This chapter sheds light on how private data is systematically collected, stored and analysed with the help of artificial intelligence. We discuss various forms of persistent surveillance at home and in public spaces. While massive data collection raises considerable ethical concerns, it is also the basis for better performance for AI systems.

This section discusses several applications of AI to specific areas and illustrates the challenges and importance of ethics in these areas. While we cover autonomous vehicles and military uses of AI in separate chapters, here we discuss issues of AI for enhancement, healthcare and education.

This chapter discusses the general risks that businesses face before considering specific ethical risks that companies developing AI systems and robots need to consider. Guidance on how to manage these risks is provided. It is argued that companies should do what is ethically desirable not just the minimum that is legally necessary. Evidence is giv...

This book provides an introduction into the ethics of robots and artificial intelligence. The book was written with university students, policy makers, and professionals in mind but should be accessible for most adults. The book is meant to provide balanced and, at times, conflicting viewpoints as to the benefits and deficits of AI through the lens...

The recent success of AI and robotics has massively increased the international awareness of and the interest in these topics as a factor of economic competitiveness. This concerns not only businesses, but also regional and national governments. There are many claims about the potential for AI to create new service and product innovation. Such clai...

This chapter discusses the question of who is responsible in the case of an accident involving a robot or an AI system that results in some form of damage. Assigning liability is challenging because of the complexity of the situation and because of the complexity of the system. We discuss examples of an autonomous vehicle accident and mistargeting...

In this chapter we discuss the controversial topic of autonomous weapons systems. We define terms, present elements and perspectives related to the debate surrounding autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and present the main arguments for and against the use of such systems.

In this chapter we discuss how people relate to robots and autonomous systems from a psychological point of view. Humans tend to anthropomorphise them and form unidirectional relationships. The trust in these relationships is the basis for persuasion and manipulation that can be used for good and evil.

This chapter introduces the theories that form the basis of the ethical review of robots and AI systems. We introduce the major approaches to moral theory (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics) and discuss the relation of ethics to law. Finally, we discuss how these theories might be implemented in a machine to enable it to make ethical d...

This chapter discusses the role that trust and fairness play in the acceptance of AI systems. We then relate trust and fairness in AI systems to five principles: Non-maleficence, Beneficence, Autonomy, Justice and Explicability.

Most people struggle to understand probability which is an issue for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers who need to communicate risks and uncertainties to the participants in their studies, the media and policy makers. Previous work showed that even the use of numerical values to express probabilities does not guarantee an accurate understan...

It is not uncommon for humans to exhibit abusive behaviour towards robots. This study compares how abusive behaviour towards a human is perceived differently in comparison with identical behaviour towards a robot. We showed participants 16 video clips of unparalleled quality that depicted different levels of violence and abuse. For each video, we a...

The role of robots in society keeps expanding and diversifying, bringing with it a host of issues surrounding the relationship between robots and humans. This introduction to human-robot interaction (HRI), written by leading researchers in this developing field, is the first to provide a broad overview of the multidisciplinary topics central to mod...

Emotions play an important role in human-agent interaction. To realise natural interaction it is essential for an agent to be able to analyse the sentiment in users' utterances. Modern agents use a distributed service model in which their functions can be located on any number of computers including cloud-based servers. Outsourcing the speech recog...

Previous studies showed that using the 'shooter bias' paradigm, people demonstrate a similar racial bias toward dark colored robots over light colored robots (i.e., Black vs. White) as they do toward humans of similar skin tones [3]. However, such an effect could be argued to be the result of social priming. Additionally, it raises the question of...

Anthropomorphism, the attribution of humanlike characteristics to nonhuman entities, may be resulting from a dual process: first, a fast and intuitive (Type 1) process permits to quickly classify an object as humanlike and results in implicit anthropomorphism. Second, a reflective (Type 2) process may moderate the initial judgment based on consciou...

The first robotic copies of real humans have become available. They enable their users to be physically present in multiple locations simultaneously. This study investigates the influence that the embodiment of an agent has on its persuasiveness and its perceived personality. Is a robotic copy as persuasive as its human counterpart? Does it have th...

In recent years, the uncanny valley theory has been heavily investigated by researchers from various fields. However, the videos and images used in these studies do not permit any human interaction with the uncanny objects. Therefore, in the field of human–robot interaction, it is still unclear what impact, if any, an uncanny-looking robot will hav...

Humans recognise and respond to robots as social agents, to such extent that they occasionally aaempt to bully a robot. e current paper investigates whether aggressive behaviour directed towards robots is innuenced by the same social processes that guide human bullying behaviour. More speciically, it measured the eeects of dehumanisation primes and...

Abyss Creations LLC is selling highly realistic and anatomically complete dolls for decades. The interaction that customers have with the dolls has been subject to many controversial discussions. David Levy already showed that humanity has been rather inventive when it comes to machines that useful for sexual purposes. Abyss Creations recently reve...