Transparency Obligations and Machine Ethics

In Article 50, „Transparency Obligations for Providers and Deployers of Certain AI Systems“, of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, it is stated: „Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use.“ On this subject, the European Parliament had already been advised ten years earlier by Oliver Bendel. In his lecture „Moral and Immoral Machines – Moralische und unmoralische Maschinen“ in Brussels on September 8, 2016, he presented GOODBOT, a chatbot initiated by him in 2013 in the context of machine ethics, which featured several escalation levels while repeatedly making clear that it was merely a machine. At the Digital Europe Working Group Conference Robotics on November 8, 2017, Bendel also spoke online about related questions in machine ethics. In connection with a care robot, he raised the question: „Should the robot make clear that it’s just a machine?“ The transparency obligations set out in Article 50 will enter into force on August 2, 2026.

Fig.: A modern take on the GOODBOT (Image: GPT Image 2)