ROLEMODELS

What if agents would not allow for being negative role models for humans? 

This fiction is a provocation around the unpredictable consequences of conversational agents‘ responses to humans’ actions and their incapability to understand the contexts they and the humans interacting with them are in. 

This ad gives and example of how the company is trying to be a better ROLEMODEL.

For example answering with „If you’re rude one more time I will ignore you for the rest of the day.“ Instead of staying SILENT. 

While the company goal sounds promising the following example shows that it can still go wrong. 

Let’s listen to Sandra, who experienced unintended consequences:

On the other hand THIS example shows how the companies feature can also achieve positive effects

This is Sam:

Obviously these are only two stories describing many possible consequences.

While silence may encourage to continuously use the agent as punching bags - this bad behavior could even translate into real life and onto human-human relationships. 

This story points out that it is not that simple to prevent abusive behavior towards agents, by just making them defend themselves.

It shows the inability of agents to oversee the humans’ context and the impact they may have, by triggering even further unintended, worse consequences through their reactions.

With this provocation we are addressing the power of relationships with conversational agents to shape our values and behaviors.