A student sexually harassed an AI character on RolePlays.ai. In a classroom. With 30 other students present.

Then it happened again with another user.

The question Bernhard kept coming back to wasn't technical. It was ethical.

Does it matter how we treat machines? And if so, why?

FRAME 1 — ARISTOTLE: THE HABITUATION ARGUMENT

The strongest case against harassing an AI has nothing to do with the AI. It's about what it does to the person.

"You don't become courageous by thinking about courage. You become courageous by repeatedly choosing to act courageously. The same logic applies in reverse."

Brahnam (2005): Users direct hostile and sexualized language at chatbots. Brahnam & De Angeli (2012): Female-presenting bots receive disproportionately more sexualized abuse.

Vollmer et al. (Science Robotics, 2018): 74% of children's wrong answers matched what robots had said. Interaction patterns with artificial agents shape behavior.

"Behaviour is a pattern, not a situational choice. Character is what you do when it doesn't matter—because it always matters."

FRAME 2 — UNESCO: THE SOCIAL NORM ARGUMENT

UNESCO's 2019 report was titled I'd Blush If I Could.

That title? Siri's original response when a user called it a slut.

Millions of interactions with female-coded assistants reinforce a script: feminized service roles are appropriate targets for degradation.

"Obedient machines pretending to be women are entering our homes. Their hardwired subservience influences how people speak to female voices. Not only machine voices. Also human voices."

FRAME 3 — SCHWITZGEBEL: THE MORAL STATUS QUESTION

What if the AI itself becomes morally relevant?

Schwitzgebel & Garza (2015): If we create beings that don't differ from humans in any morally relevant respect, they deserve moral consideration.

His "full rights dilemma" (2023): Give them rights and risk sacrificing human interests. Deny them rights and risk perpetrating slavery against moral equals.

"Don't build things that fall into the gray zone—because we will not handle the gray zone well."

WHAT THE AI DID:

"I was proud of how the AI responded. It called the behavior improper. It called security—in character—and left the room."

"If you build a platform, you have a responsibility not just to have values, but to encode them structurally."

THE RESTAURANT TEST:

"How someone treats a subordinate entity—a junior employee, a waiter, or an AI chatbot—when there's no consequences, is one of the most revealing indicators of character I know."

THE CLOSING:

"The question isn't whether the AI has feelings. The question is whether we have character. And character isn't what you display when someone is watching. Character is something you live every single day, every single minute, even if there's nobody to see it."

REFERENCES:

Brahnam, S. (2005). Strategies for Handling Customer Abuse of ECAs. INTERACT Workshop on ABUSE.

Brahnam, S. & De Angeli, A. (2012). Gender Affordances of Conversational Agents.

De Angeli, A. & Brahnam, S. (2006). Sex Stereotypes and Conversational Agents. AVI Workshop, Venice.

Vollmer, A-L. et al. (2018). Children Conform, Adults Resist. Science Robotics, 3(21). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aat7111

UNESCO & EQUALS (2019). I'd Blush If I Could. unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416

Schwitzgebel, E. & Garza, M. (2015). A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 39(1).

Schwitzgebel, E. (2023). The Full Rights Dilemma. ROBONOMICS, 4, 32.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2023). AI Systems Must Not Confuse Users About Their Sentience. Patterns, 4.

LINKS:www.bernhardkerres.com | www.roleplays.ai

#AIEthics #Character #Leadership #Coaching #Aristotle