Co-authored with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz.
Accepted and forthcoming with AI and Ethics.
Apologies serve essential functions for moral agents such as expressing remorse, taking responsibility, and repairing trust. LLM-based chatbots routinely produce output that has the linguistic form of an apology. However, they do this simply because they are echoing the kinds of things that humans say. Moreover, there are reasons to think that chatbots are not the kind of linguistic or moral agents capable of apology. To put the point bluntly: Chatbot apologies are bullshit. This paper explores this concern and develops it beyond the epithet, drawing on the nature of morally serious apologies, the linguistic agency required to perform them, and the moral agency required for them to matter. We conclude by considering some consequences for how chatbots should be designed and how we ought to think about them.
@article{magnus-beyondbullshit,
title={Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit},
author={P. D. Magnus and Alessandra Buccella and Jason D'Cruz},
month=oct,
year={2025},
journal={AI and Ethics},
volume={5},
number={5},
pages={5517--5525},
doi={10.1007/s43681-025-00800-x}
}
The first on-line draft of this paper was posted 11dec2024.