Abstract
We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories (“back stories”) to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and retention in the intervention. A longitudinal randomized controlled experiment tested user attitudes towards the agent when it presented the stories in first person (as its own history) compared to third person (as happening to humans that it knew). Participants in the first person condition reported enjoying their interactions with the agent significantly more and completed more conversations with the agent, compared to participants in the third person condition, while ratings of agent dishonesty were not significantly different between the groups.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Reeves, B., Nass, C.: The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996)
van Vugt, H., Konijn, E., Hoorn, J., Veldhuis, J.: Why Fat Interface Characters Are Better e-Health Advisors. In: Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), Marina Del Rey, CA, pp. 1–13 (2006)
Bickmore, T.: Relational Agents: Effecting Change through Human-Computer Relationships. PhD Thesis in Media Arts & Sciences. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (2003)
Nyberg, D.: The varnished truth: truth telling and deceiving in ordinary life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1993)
Ford, C.: Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The psychology of deceit. American Psychiatric Publishing, Washington (1999)
Fogg, B.J.: Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Mogan Kaufmann, New York (2003)
Schneiderman, B.: Looking for the bright side of user interface agents. interactions 2, 13–15 (1995)
Klein, J., Moon, Y., Picard, R.: This Computer Responds to User Frustration: Theory, Design, Results, and Implications. Interacting with Computers 14, 119–140 (2002)
Bickmore, T.: Ethical Issues in Using Relational Agents for Older Adults. In: AAAI Fall Symposium on Caring Machines: AI in Eldercare, Washington, DC (2005)
Bates, J.: The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents. Communications of the ACM 37, 122–125 (1994)
Mateas, M.: An oz-centric review of interactive drama and believable agents. In: Veloso, M.M., Wooldridge, M.J. (eds.) Artificial Intelligence Today. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1600, pp. 297–328. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Moon, Y.: Intimate self-disclosure exchanges: Using computers to build reciprocal relationships with consumers. Harvard Business School report, Cambridge (1998)
Bickmore, T., Picard, R.: Establishing and Maintaining Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships. ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction 12, 293–327 (2005)
Weizenbaum, J.: Eliza - a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9, 36–45 (1966)
Loebner, H.: The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence, http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Gockley, R., Bruce, A., Forlizzi, J., Michalowski, M., Mundell, A., Rosenthal, S., Sellner, B., Simmons, R., Snipes, K., Schultz, A.C., Wang, J.: Designing Robots for Long-Term Social Interaction. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2005)
Ho, W., Watson, S.: Autiobiographic Knowledge for Believable Virtual Characters. Intelligent Virtual Agents, 383–394 (2006)
Bickmore, T., Schulman, D.: A Virtual Laboratory for Studying Long-term Relationships between Humans and Virtual Agents. In: Proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Budapest, Hungary (2009)
Bickmore, T., Caruso, L., Clough-Gorr, K., Heeren, T.: It’s just like you talk to a friend - Relational Agents for Older Adults. Interacting with Computers 17, 711–735 (2005)
Gordon, A., Cao, Q., Swanson, R.: Automated Story Capture From Internet Weblogs. In: Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, Whistler, BC (2007)
Swanson, R., Gordon, A.: A Comparison of Retrieval Models for Open Domain Story Generation. In: AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Stanford, CA (2009)
Cleary, C., Bareiss, R.: Practical Method for Automatically Generating Typed Links. In: Hypertext 1996, pp. 31–41 (1996)
R Core Development Team: R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria (2009)
Jakobson, R.: Linguistics and Poetics. In: Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) Style in language, pp. 130–144. MIT Press, Cambridge (1960)
Jefferson, G.: Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In: Schenkein, J. (ed.) Studies in the organization of conversational interaction, pp. 219–248. Academic Press, New York (1978)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bickmore, T., Schulman, D., Yin, L. (2009). Engagement vs. Deceit: Virtual Humans with Human Autobiographies. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5773. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04380-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04380-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04379-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04380-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)