Related papers: Ghosting the Machine: Stop Calling Human-Agent Rel…
Emerging reports of the harms caused to children and adults by AI sycophancy and by parasocial ties with chatbots point to an urgent need for safeguards against such risks. Yet, preventing such dynamics is challenging: parasocial cues often…
In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several…
With the rise of human-machine communication, machines are increasingly designed with humanlike characteristics, such as gender, which can inadvertently trigger cognitive biases. Many conversational agents (CAs), such as voice assistants…
When AI systems allow human-like communication, they elicit increasingly complex relational responses. Knowledge workers face a particular challenge: They approach these systems as tools while interacting with them in ways that resemble…
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widespread, one question that arises is how human-AI interaction might impact human-human interaction. Chatbots, for example, are increasingly used as social companions, and while much is…
Current discourse on Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics, dominated by "trustworthy" and "responsible" AI, overlooks a more fundamental human-computer interaction (HCI) crisis: the erosion of human agency. This paper argues that the primary…
The integration of Conversational Agents (CAs) into daily life offers opportunities to tackle global challenges, leading to the emergence of Conversational AI for Social Good (CAI4SG). This paper examines the advancements of CAI4SG using a…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now widely used to facilitate social interaction, but its impact on social relationships and communication is not well understood. We study the social consequences of one of the most pervasive AI…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
The rapid convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) toward conversational chatbot interfaces marks a critical moment for the industry. This paper argues that the chatbot paradigm is not a neutral interface choice, but a dominant…
Chatbots are increasingly integrated into people's lives and are widely used to help people. Recently, there has also been growing interest in the reverse direction-humans help chatbots-due to a wide range of benefits including better…
Powered by large language models, a new genre of multi-agent social platforms has emerged. Apps such as Social.AI deploy numerous AI agents that emulate human behavior, creating unprecedented bot-centric social networks. Yet, existing…
As generative AI chatbots become more personalized and emotionally responsive, they increasingly serve as companions, friends, and romantic partners. Yet these relationships are accompanied by significant uncertainty: users question the…
Technologies increasingly mimic human-like social behaviours. Beyond prototypical conversational agents like chatbots, this also applies to basic automated systems like app notifications or self-checkout machines that address or 'talk to'…
Technology companies have produced varied responses to concerns about the effects of the design of their conversational AI systems. Some have claimed that their voice assistants are in fact not gendered or human-like -- despite design…
The quickly growing popularity of AI companions poses risks to mental health, personal wellbeing, and social relationships. Past work has identified many individual factors that can drive human-companion interaction, but we know little…
Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and…
Human-like AI agents such as robots and chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but they present a variety of ethical concerns. The first concern is in how we define humanness, and how our definition impacts communities historically…
Conversational agents have been showing lots of opportunities in healthcare by taking over a lot of tasks that used to be done by a human. One of the major functions of conversational healthcare agent is intervening users' daily behaviors.…
For artificial intelligence to be beneficial to humans the behaviour of AI agents needs to be aligned with what humans want. In this paper we discuss some behavioural issues for language agents, arising from accidental misspecification by…