We are pleased to announce our latest peer-reviewed publication, Robots, Chatbots, Self-Driving Cars: Perceptions of Mind and Morality Across Artificial Intelligences,” in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Abstract
AI systems have rapidly advanced, diversified, and proliferated, but our knowledge of people’s perceptions of mind and morality in them is limited, despite its importance for outcomes such as whether people trust AIs and how they assign responsibility for AI-caused harms. In a preregistered online study, 975 participants rated 26 AI and non-AI entities. Overall, AIs were perceived to have low-to-moderate agency (e.g., planning, acting), between inanimate objects and ants, and low experience (e.g., sensing, feeling). For example, ChatGPT was rated only as capable of feeling pleasure and pain as a rock. The analogous moral faculties, moral agency (doing right or wrong) and moral patiency (being treated rightly or wrongly) were higher and more varied, particularly moral agency: The highest-rated AI, a Tesla Full Self-Driving car, was rated as morally responsible for harm as a chimpanzee. We discuss how design choices can help manage perceptions, particularly in high-stakes moral contexts.
The paper is available open access on the ACM website: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713130
A preprint version is available on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18683