ABSTRACT
Recent research has indicated that people engage, and unabashedly so, in the verbal abuse of female-gendered robots. To understand whether this also cuts across racial lines, and furthermore, whether it differs from objectifying treatment of actual people, we conducted a preliminary mixed-methods investigation of online commentary on videos of three such robots -- Bina48, Nadine, and YangYang -- contrasted with commentary on videos of three women with similar identity cues. Analysis of the frequency and nature of abusive commentary suggests that: (1) the verbal abuse of the Bina48 and YangYang (two robots racialized as Black and Asian respectively) is laced with both subtle and overt racism; (2) people more readily engage in the verbal abuse of humanlike robots (versus other people). Not only do these findings reflect a concerning phenomenon, consideration is warranted as to whether people»s engagement in abusive interactions with humanlike robots could impact their subsequent interactions with other people.
- Drazen Brscić, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Takayuki Kanda . 2015. Escaping from children's abuse of social robots. Proceedings of HRI. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Justine Cassell . 2000. Embodied conversational agents. MIT press.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Antonella De Angeli and Sheryl Brahnam . 2008. I hate you! Disinhibition with virtual partners. Interacting with Computers Vol. 20, 3 (2008). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brian R Duffy . 2003. Anthropomorphism and the social robot. Robotics and Autonomous Systems Vol. 42, 3 (2003).Google Scholar
- Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon . 2000. Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of Social Issues Vol. 56, 1 (2000).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass . 1996. How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. Cambridge University Press.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pericle Salvini, Gaetano Ciaravella, Wonpil Yu, Gabriele Ferri, Alessandro Manzi, Barbara Mazzolai, Cecilia Laschi, Sang-Rok Oh, and Paolo Dario . 2010. How safe are service robots in urban environments? Proceedings of RO-MAN. IEEE.Google Scholar
- Megan Strait, Cynthia Aguillon, Virginia Contreras, and Noemi Garcia . 2017. Online Social Commentary Reflects an Appearance-Based Uncanny Valley, a General Fear of a “Technology Takeover”, and the Unabashed Sexualization of Female-Gendered Robots. In Proceedings of RO-MAN. IEEE.Google Scholar
- George Veletsianos, Cassandra Scharber, and Aaron Doering . 2008. When sex, drugs, and violence enter the classroom: Conversations between adolescents and a female pedagogical agent. Interacting with Computers Vol. 20, 3 (2008). Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Racialization and Humanness on the Verbal Abuse of Female-Gendered Robots
Recommendations
Why Do Children Abuse Robots?
HRI'15 Extended Abstracts: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended AbstractsWe found that children sometimes abuse a social robot in a hallway of a shopping mall. They spoke bad words, repeatedly obstructed the robot's path, and sometimes even kicked and punched the robot. To investigate why they abused it, we conducted a field ...
Escaping from Children's Abuse of Social Robots
HRI '15: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot InteractionSocial robots working in public space often stimulate children's curiosity. However, sometimes children also show abusive behavior toward robots. In our case studies, we observed in many cases that children persistently obstruct the robot's activity. ...
Inducing Bystander Interventions During Robot Abuse with Social Mechanisms
HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot InteractionWe explored whether a robot can leverage social influences to motivate nearby bystanders to intervene and defend them from human abuse. We designed a between-subjects study where 48 participants took part in a memorization task and observed a ...
Comments