Public perception of android robots: Indications from an analysis of YouTube comments

Abstract

The public perception of android robots is a field of growing applied relevance. Currently, most androids are confined within controlled environments rendering interactions between potential end-users, and robots challenging. Even more challenging is for researchers to investigate end-users' perception of androids. We exploit pre-existing YouTube comments as artifacts for quantitative content analysis to gain an indication of social perception on androids. We perform a content analysis of 10301 YouTube comments from four different videos, and reflect on the textual reactions to video stimuli of four extremely human-like android robots. We use text mining and machine learning techniques to process and analyze our corpus. Our findings reveal three equally important topics that should be considered for paving the way towards a robotic society: human-robot relationships, technical specifications, and the science fiction valley. Considering people's attitudes, fears and wishes towards androids, researchers can increase citizen awareness, and engagement.