Ethics of Conversational User Interfaces

Abstract

Building on the prior workshops on conversational user interfaces (CUIs) [2, 40], we tackle the topic of ethics of CUIs at CHI 2022. Though commercial CUI developments continue to rapidly advance, our scholarly dialogue on ethics of CUIs is underwhelming. The CUI community has implicitly been concerned with ethics, yet making it central to the growing body of work thus far has not been adequately done. Since ethics is a far-reaching topic, perspectives from philosophy, design, and engineering domains are integral to our CUI research community. For instance, philosophical traditions, e.g., deontology or virtue ethics, can guide ethical concepts that are relevant for CUIs, e.g., autonomy or trust. The practice of design through approaches like value sensitive design can inform how CUIs should be developed. Ethics comes into play with technical contributions, e.g., privacy-preserving data sharing between conversational systems. By considering such multidisciplinary angles, we come to a special topic of interest that ties together philosophy, design, and engineering: conversational disclosure, e.g., sharing personal information, transparency, e.g., as how to transparently convey relevant information in a conversational manner, and vulnerability of diverse user groups that should be taken into consideration.