AI Automatons: AI Systems Intended to Imitate Humans

TL;DR

The paper addresses the rise of AI automatons designed to imitate humans and proposes a four-axis conceptual framework to analyze their design and ethical implications. By structuring considerations around scope, intended uses, ownership/control, and impacts, it maps how target selection, fidelity, adaptability, and purpose shape risks like misrepresentation, impersonation, and emotional harm. The framework draws on existing literature and diverse applications to guide developers and stakeholders in reflexive, explicit decision-making and governance, rather than prescribing a single method. This approach enables targeted empirical studies and informed discussions about which configurations are advisable or ethically permissible in real-world deployment.

Abstract

There is a growing proliferation of AI systems designed to mimic people's behavior, work, abilities, likenesses, or humanness -- systems we dub AI automatons. Individuals, groups, or generic humans are being simulated to produce creative work in their styles, to respond to surveys in their places, to probe how they would use a new system before deployment, to provide users with assistance and companionship, and to anticipate their possible future behavior and interactions with others, just to name a few applications. The research, design, deployment, and availability of such AI systems have, however, also prompted growing concerns about a wide range of possible legal, ethical, and other social impacts. To both 1) facilitate productive discussions about whether, when, and how to design and deploy such systems, and 2) chart the current landscape of existing and prospective AI automatons, we need to tease apart determinant design axes and considerations that can aid our understanding of whether and how various design choices along these axes could mitigate -- or instead exacerbate -- potential adverse impacts that the development and use of AI automatons could give rise to. In this paper, through a synthesis of related literature and extensive examples of existing AI systems intended to mimic humans, we develop a conceptual framework to help foreground key axes of design variations and provide analytical scaffolding to foster greater recognition of the design choices available to developers, as well as the possible ethical implications these choices might have.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Simulations can range from targeting characteristics of specific individuals to more general group characteristics and even more general human characteristics (x-axis). They can also range from simulating single or multiple entities (y-axis).