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Exposed by AIs! People Personally Witness Artificial Intelligence Exposing Personal Information and Exposing People to Undesirable Content
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
  • Daniel Burton Shank, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Alexander Gott
Abstract

Do people personally witness artificial intelligence (AI) committing moral wrongs? If so, what kinds of moral wrong and what situations produce these? To address these questions, respondents selected one of six prompt questions, each based on a moral foundation violation, asking about a personally-witnessed interaction with an AI resulting in a moral victim (victim prompts) or where the AI seemed to engage in immoral actions (action prompt). Respondents then answered their selected question in an open-ended response. In conjunction with liberty/privacy and purity moral foundations and across both victim and action prompts, respondents most frequently reported moral violations as two types of exposure by AIs: their personal information being exposed (31%) and people’s exposure to undesirable content (20%). AIs expose people’s personal information to their colleagues, close relations, and online due to information sharing across devices, people in proximity of audio devices, and simple accidents. AIs expose people, often children, to undesirable content such as nudity, pornography, violence, and profanity due to their proximity to audio devices and to seemly purposeful action. We argue that the prominence in reporting these types of exposure may be due to their frequent occurrence on personal and home devices. This suggests that research on AI ethics should not only focus on the prototypically harmful moral dilemmas (e.g., autonomous vehicle deciding whom to sacrifice) but everyday interactions with personal technology.

Department(s)
Psychological Science
Comments

This research was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant Number W911NF-19-1-0246.

Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2020 Taylor & Francis, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
5-25-2020
Publication Date
25 May 2020
Disciplines
Citation Information
Daniel Burton Shank and Alexander Gott. "Exposed by AIs! People Personally Witness Artificial Intelligence Exposing Personal Information and Exposing People to Undesirable Content" International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (2020) ISSN: 1044-7318; 1532-7590
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/daniel-shank/32/