Who’s Liable?: Agency and Accountability in Human–Machine Communication

Most people are familiar with chatbots, the interactive pieces of software that allow programs to engage in conversations (Neff & Nagy, 2016; Wolf et al., 2017). Organizations have deployed bots to engage audiences in ad campaigns, to answer questions about financial services, for legal services, and elections. Of course, bots are also used purely for artistic expression as well as for social experiments. Bots are deployed to see what will happen when they get into conversations with other social media accounts. And these experiments have made for interesting, though not necessarily shocking results. While these instances, and others like them, may not rise to the level of a legal issue in the United States, they do evoke questions about who is responsible when the use of communicative technology ends in error. The past several years have been those of accelerated innovation in technology, particularly with …