97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 67. Should Chatbots Be Held to a Higher Ethical Standard than Humans?

Naomi Arcadia Kaduwela

Head of Kavi Labs, Kavi Global

We have seen an explosion of chatbots in the market. AI has become ingrained into the daily fabric of our lives. Service industries have turned to AI-driven chatbots to manage customer interactions, increasing speed and quality of resolution while decreasing cost. Millennials increasingly prefer to interact with chatbots rather than humans. As we embrace chatbots in our lives, it is paramount to evaluate the role they play in reinforcing and perpetuating societal biases and stereotypes. With the proliferation of chatbots creating a new paradigm of human and machine collaboration, an interesting ethical question emerges: should we hold chatbots to a higher ethical standard than we hold ourselves?

Underlying chatbots are natural language processing (NLP) models made up of deep learning algorithms called neural networks. Deep learning models have the ability to accurately map complex relationships from messy data—in text as well as images. So what are popular NLP models like convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) doing in chatbots? They are mathematically defining relationships between words, as explicitly or implicitly defined in the training corpus.

Examples of Chatbots ...