Towards Artificial Virtuous Agents: Games, Dilemmas and Machine Learning

08/30/2022
by   Ajay Vishwanath, et al.
0

Machine ethics has received increasing attention over the past few years because of the need to ensure safe and reliable artificial intelligence (AI). The two dominantly used theories in machine ethics are deontological and utilitarian ethics. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, has often been mentioned as an alternative ethical theory. While this interesting approach has certain advantages over popular ethical theories, little effort has been put into engineering artificial virtuous agents due to challenges in their formalization, codifiability, and the resolution of ethical dilemmas to train virtuous agents. We propose to bridge this gap by using role-playing games riddled with moral dilemmas. There are several such games in existence, such as Papers, Please and Life is Strange, where the main character encounters situations where they must choose the right course of action by giving up something else dear to them. We draw inspiration from such games to show how a systemic role-playing game can be designed to develop virtues within an artificial agent. Using modern day AI techniques, such as affinity-based reinforcement learning and explainable AI, we motivate the implementation of virtuous agents that play such role-playing games, and the examination of their decisions through a virtue ethical lens. The development of such agents and environments is a first step towards practically formalizing and demonstrating the value of virtue ethics in the development of ethical agents.

READ FULL TEXT
research
06/08/2020

Reinforcement Learning Under Moral Uncertainty

An ambitious goal for artificial intelligence is to create agents that b...
research
08/03/2023

Thespian: Multi-Character Text Role-Playing Game Agents

Text-adventure games and text role-playing games are grand challenges fo...
research
12/07/2018

Toward the Engineering of Virtuous Machines

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been st...
research
12/17/2019

Artificial Agents Learn Flexible Visual Representations by Playing a Hiding Game

The ubiquity of embodied gameplay, observed in a wide variety of animal ...
research
02/01/2020

Machine Ethics: The Creation of a Virtuous Machine

Artificial intelligent (AI) was initially developed as an implicit moral...
research
05/12/2023

The Ethics of AI in Games

Video games are one of the richest and most popular forms of human-compu...
research
04/03/2019

Rinascimento: Optimising Statistical Forward Planning Agents for Playing Splendor

Game-based benchmarks have been playing an essential role in the develop...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset