Call for Participation
“Chatbots and a new kind of responsibility gap?”
A talk by Guido Löhr of Eindhoven University of Technology
May 17, 2023 at 15:00 CET
Institute of Philosophy, Leuven (Belgium) and online
The KU Leuven Chair Ethics and AI and Working Group on Philosophy of Technology are pleased to invite you to a talk by Guido Löhr of Eindhoven University of Technology entitled Chatbots and a new kind of responsibility gap?
The event will take place Wednesday May 17, 2023, at 15:00 (CET) at the Institute of Philosophy, Leuven. No registration is required for in-person attendance. If attending online, please register by sending an email to chair.ai.ethics@gmail.com indicating your interest. The link to join the event will be sent the day before it takes place.
ABSTRACT: The claim that will be defended is that chatbots create their own kind of speech act responsibility gap. Their speech acts generate obligations and entitlements that cannot be attributed to the company that runs the chatbot (“proxy agents”) and are functionally best attributed to the chatbot itself. This generates a puzzle. How could a chatbot take on obligations and entitlements by generating text in a mindless manner? This gap will be bridged by introducing a new way of thinking about relational responsibility (directed duties, claims etc.) in the linguistic realm that does not require any sophisticated mental states.
GUIDO LÖHR is a postdoctoral researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology and in the research consortium Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (esdit) in the Netherlands. Before joining esdit, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Radboud University where he worked with Bart Geurts on the normative aspects of language. In May 2020, he received his PhD in philosophy from Ruhr University Bochum and École Normale Supérieure, Paris (Institut Jean Nicod/Département d’Études Cognitives).