Towards Artificial Virtuous Agents: Games, Dilemmas and Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper explores how role-playing games with moral dilemmas can be used to develop and train artificial agents embodying virtue ethics, leveraging modern AI techniques like reinforcement learning and explainability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to formalize and implement virtue ethics in AI agents through game-based training and ethical decision analysis.

Findings

Proposes a systemic role-playing game framework for virtue development in AI

Utilizes affinity-based reinforcement learning for virtuous decision-making

Incorporates explainable AI to analyze ethical choices

Abstract

Machine ethics has received increasing attention over the past few years because of the need to ensure safe and reliable artificial intelligence (AI). The two dominantly used theories in machine ethics are deontological and utilitarian ethics. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, has often been mentioned as an alternative ethical theory. While this interesting approach has certain advantages over popular ethical theories, little effort has been put into engineering artificial virtuous agents due to challenges in their formalization, codifiability, and the resolution of ethical dilemmas to train virtuous agents. We propose to bridge this gap by using role-playing games riddled with moral dilemmas. There are several such games in existence, such as Papers, Please and Life is Strange, where the main character encounters situations where they must choose the right course of action by giving up something else dear to them. We draw inspiration from such games to show how a systemic role-playing game can be designed to develop virtues within an artificial agent. Using modern day AI techniques, such as affinity-based reinforcement learning and explainable AI, we motivate the implementation of virtuous agents that play such role-playing games, and the examination of their decisions through a virtue ethical lens. The development of such agents and environments is a first step towards practically formalizing and demonstrating the value of virtue ethics in the development of ethical agents.