Is It Morally Acceptable for a System to Lie to Persuade Me

摘要

Given the fast rise of increasingly autonomous artifi-cial agents and robots, a key acceptability criterion will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems de-signed to influence humans via communication) consti-tute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature. Still, ethical studies in this area are rare and tend to focus on the output of the required action. Instead, this work focuses on the persuasive acts them-selves (e.g. “is it morally acceptable that a machine lies or appeals to the emotions of a person to persuade her, even if for a good end?”). Exploiting a behavioral ap-proach, based on human assessment of moral dilemmas – i.e. without any prior assumption of underlying ethi-cal theories – this paper reports on a set of experiments. These experiments address the type of persuader (hu-man or machine), the strategies adopted (purely argu-mentative, appeal to positive emotions, appeal to nega-tive emotions, lie) and the circumstances. Findings dis-play no differences due to the agent, mild acceptability for persuasion and reveal that truth-conditional reason-ing (i.e. argument validity) is a significant dimension affecting subjects ’ judgment. Some implications for the design of intelligent persuasive systems are discussed.