Playing the Blame Game with Robots
Markus Kneer, Michael T. Stuart

TL;DR
This study investigates why people blame AI systems for harm, finding that blame attribution depends on perceived cognitive abilities and that more sophisticated AI shifts blame from humans to the AI itself.
Contribution
The paper provides empirical evidence linking perceived AI cognitive capacity to blame attribution and explores how AI sophistication influences moral blame shifting.
Findings
People are willing to blame AI for recklessness.
Blame depends on perceived cognitive abilities of AI.
Higher AI sophistication shifts blame from humans to AI.
Abstract
Recent research shows -- somewhat astonishingly -- that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]-[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral-psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system runs a risk of poisoning people by using a novel type of fertilizer. Manipulating the computational (or quasi-cognitive) abilities of the AI system in a between-subjects design, we tested whether people's willingness to ascribe knowledge of a substantial risk of harm (i.e., recklessness) and blame to the AI system. Furthermore, we investigated whether the ascription of recklessness and blame to…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
