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Developing moral awareness in intelligent systems has shifted from a topic of philosophical inquiry to a critical and practical issue in artificial intelligence over the past decades. However, automated inference of everyday moral…

Integrating generative AI such as Large Language Models into social robots has improved their ability to engage in natural, human-like communication. This study presents a method to examine their persuasive capabilities. We designed an…

Social robots and conversational agents are being explored as supports for wellbeing, goal-setting, and everyday self-regulation. While prior work highlights their potential to motivate and guide users, much of the evidence relies on…

Artificial intelligence chatbots have achieved unprecedented adoption, with millions now using these systems for emotional support and companionship in contexts of widespread social isolation and capacity-constrained mental health services.…

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to influence cooperative dynamics with greater applicability and control. In this paper, we examine the impact of third-party bots--agents that do not directly participate in…

A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health/wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly…

As AI systems become an increasing part of people's everyday lives, it becomes ever more important that they understand people's ethical norms. Motivated by descriptive ethics, a field of study that focuses on people's descriptive judgments…

Practical uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the real world have demonstrated the importance of embedding moral choices into intelligent agents. They have also highlighted that defining top-down ethical constraints on AI according to…

In high-stakes AI-supported decisions, considerations are not purely technical but involve moral judgments about fairness, responsibility, and harm. While prior research has focused mainly on functional or behavioral alignment, this paper…

Chatbots have become increasingly prevalent. A growing body of research focused on the issue of human trust in AI. However, most existing user studies are conducted primarily with adult groups, overlooking teenagers who are also engaging…

For a growing number of people, AI chatbots have become close personal companions. Despite rising scholarly attention, theoretical accounts of how such relationships develop remain fragmented. Existing frameworks address important aspects…

How can we build AI systems that can learn any set of individual human values both quickly and safely, avoiding causing harm or violating societal standards for acceptable behavior during the learning process? We explore the effects of…

As AI systems become more advanced and widely deployed, there will likely be increasing debate over whether AI systems could have conscious experiences, desires, or other states of potential moral significance. It is important to inform…

Conversational systems or chatbots are an example of AI-Infused Applications (AIIA). Chatbots are especially important as they are often the first interaction of clients with a business and are the entry point of a business into the AI…

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…

Despite growing recognition that responsible AI requires domain knowledge, current work on conversational AI primarily draws on clinical expertise that prioritises diagnosis and intervention. However, much of everyday emotional support…

Autonomous systems increasingly require moral judgment capabilities, yet whether these capabilities scale predictably with model size remains unexplored. We systematically evaluate 75 large language model configurations (0.27B--1000B…

As chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, we often wonder what users perceive as natural and socially accepted manners of interacting with them. Some researchers maintain that humans should avoid engaging in emotional conversations…

Social interactions promote well-being, yet barriers like geographic distance, time limitations, and mental health conditions can limit face-to-face interactions. Emotionally responsive AI systems, such as chatbots, offer new opportunities…

The question of whether artificial entities deserve moral consideration has become one of the defining ethical challenges of AI research. Existing frameworks for moral patiency rely on verified ontological properties, such as sentience,…