On manipulation by emotional AI: UK adults' views and governance implications.

With growing commercial, regulatory and scholarly interest in use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to profile and interact with human emotion ("emotional AI"), attention is turning to its capacity for people, relating to factors impacting on a person's decisions and behavior. Given prior social disquiet about AI and profiling technologies, surprisingly little is known on people's views on the benefits and harms of emotional AI technologies, especially their capacity for manipulation. This matters because regulators of AI (such as in the European Union and the UK) wish to stimulate AI innovation, minimize harms and build public trust in these systems, but to do so they should understand the public's expectations.

Replika in the Metaverse: the moral problem with empathy in 'It from Bit'.

This paper assesses claims of computational empathy in relation to existing social open-ended chatbots and intention that these chatbots will feature in emergent mixed reality contexts, recently given prominence due to interest in the Metaverse. Against the background of increasing loneliness within society and use of chatbots as a potential remedy for this, the paper considers two leading current social chatbots, and Microsoft's , their technical underpinnings, empathetic claims and properties that have scope to scale into the Metaverse (if it coheres). Finding scope for human benefit from social chatbots, the paper highlights problematic reliance on self-disclosure to sustain the existence of chatbots.