Research Summary: Conversational AI: Social and
Ethical Considerations
Nayeemuzzaman
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Dhaka
Dhaka, Bangladesh
n.nayeem.rm@gmail.com
I. A BSTRACT
This paper outlines the social,cultural and ethical issues re-
lating to the emergence of Conversational AI in human civi-
lization and some measurements that can be taken to possibly
resolve them
II. I NTRODUCTION
There are five issues regarding Conversational Agents that
have potential ethical issues and there are some proposed
solutions to this issues presented on this paper.All of the
solutions include in the development phase of the CAs.
III. OVERVIEW
A. Contextual Conversation
One of the major characteristics of a human-human conversa-
tion is that it is contextual.Some conversations that may be
suitable in a situation/group, are not in others. This raises
some ethical questions on how to handle different contexts
and user domains. This paper suggested the principles through
which CAs are built should be dependent on context, goals of
the agent(s) and user domain (which in this paper is called
plurality approach) over some abstract principles.
B. Trust and Transparency
Another issue this paper highlighted is related to trust and
transparency. Transparency about CAs goals and capabilities
helps users to make informed choices which can prevent
users from self harming themselves.Users expectations should
not be taken advantage of.There should be trust between the
developers and target users.
C. Privacy
Ethical consideration around privacy issues regarding CAs.
It’s a legal issue as well(varies geographically). This paper
suggests seeing legal requirements as a baseline.Users should
be aware of what data is being compromised.
D. Agent Persona
Agent persona raises another issue regarding ethical issues of
using CAs. Research has shown that agent persona can directly
affect creating stereotypes. The paper suggests developers to
make agent’s persona to be androgynous and neutral.
Farhan Mahmud
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Dhaka
Dhaka, Bangladesh
mahmud.farhan1903@gmail.com
E. Anthropomorphism and Sexualisation
Anthropomorphism and sexualisation issues towards CAs have
been mentioned in this paper. A part of user groups tend to
be verbally sexual towards the agents. The paper suggests to
handle the utterance and response with some strategies that
might include no response,neutral response, in-kind response
or escalation to a human agent.
IV. M ETHODOLOGY
No special methodology was used for data collection. This
paper deals with abstract concepts. As such, data collection
was not of central importance. So, no explicit data collection
methodology was used.
V. R ESULTS
This paper does not explicitly mention any result figures
gained from it’s proposed solutions. So, no result figures are
given.
VI. D ISCUSSION
This paper discusses some unpopular topics regarding Conver-
sational AI because most works regarding CAs involve mainly
the technological aspects of it. But, it fails to demonstrate any
results obtained from it’s proposed solutions to these issues. It
would be better demonstrated if there were some experiments
conducted with the proposed suggestions and some results
obtained from those experiments.
R EFERENCES
Ruane, E., Birhane, A., & Ventresque, A. (2019, December).
Conversational AI: Social and Ethical Considerations. In AICS
(pp. 104-115).