Perception of Creative Responses to Moral Dilemmas by a Conversational Robot

Moral HRI is investigating humans' perception and reasoning regarding robots' responses to moral dilemmas. Understanding moral dilemmas as cases of tragedy, we identify creative responses as an alternative to responses based on ethical principles such as deontology or utilitarianism. We propose a computational procedure based on AI planning that can generate such responses. We report results from an exploratory study to obtain a preliminary understanding of how the character of creative ethical reasoning robots is perceived compared to the more commonly discussed utilitarian and deontological robots.