A Storytelling Robot managing Persuasive and Ethical Stances via ACT-R: an Exploratory Study
This addresses the challenge of building persuasive AI agents with ethical considerations, though it appears incremental as it integrates existing cognitive models and techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a storytelling robot that uses persuasive techniques and ethical stances in dialogues about COVID-19, resulting in an exploratory evaluation with 63 participants.
We present a storytelling robot, controlled via the ACT-R cognitive architecture, able to adopt different persuasive techniques and ethical stances while conversing about some topics concerning COVID-19. The main contribution of the paper consists in the proposal of a needs-driven model that guides and evaluates, during the dialogue, the use (if any) of persuasive techniques available in the agent procedural memory. The portfolio of persuasive techniques tested in such a model ranges from the use of storytelling, to framing techniques and rhetorical-based arguments. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt of building a persuasive agent able to integrate a mix of explicitly grounded cognitive assumptions about dialogue management, storytelling and persuasive techniques as well as ethical attitudes. The paper presents the results of an exploratory evaluation of the system on 63 participants