Parental Acceptance of Children’s Storytelling Robots: A Projection of the Uncanny Valley of AI

Abstract

Parent–child story time is an important ritual of contemporary parenting. Recently, robots with artificial intelligence (AI) have become common. Parental acceptance of children’s storytelling robots, however, has received scant attention. To address this, we conducted a qualitative study with 18 parents using the research technique design fiction. Overall, parents held mixed, though generally positive, attitudes toward children’s storytelling robots. In their estimation, these robots would outperform screen-based technologies for children’s story time. However, the robots’ potential to adapt and to express emotion caused some parents to feel ambivalent about the robots, which might hinder their adoption. We found three predictors of parental acceptance of these robots: context of use, perceived agency, and perceived intelligence. Parents’ speculation revealed an uncanny valley of AI: a nonlinear relation between the human likeness of the artificial agent’s mind and affinity for the agent. Finally, we consider the implications of children’s storytelling robots, including how they could enhance equity in children’s access to education, and propose directions for research on their design to benefit family well-being.

A Meta-analysis of the Uncanny Valley's Independent and Dependent Variables

“…1. a function like Mori's graph that maps a given degree of human likeness to a level of affect [Bartneck et al 2009a;Burleigh et al 2013;Chen et al 2010;Gray & Wegner 2012;Kätsyri et al 2019;Lin et al 2021;Ramey 2005;Sasaki et al 2017;Schneider et al 2009;Schwind et al 2018;Seyama & Nagayama 2007]; 2. deviations from norms of human appearance and movement [Chaminade et al 2007;MacDorman & Ishiguro 2006;Mathur & Reichling 2016;Palomäki et al 2018;Seyama & Nagayama 2007;]; 3. violations of expectations about human appearance and behavior [Bartneck et al 2009a;MacDorman & Ishiguro 2006]; 4. sensitivity to nonhuman features that increases with an entity's human likeness Green et al 2008;MacDorman et al 2013]; 5. a mismatch between human and nonhuman features [Ho & MacDorman, 2010;MacDorman et al 2009;Mitchell et al 2011b;Moore 2012;Takahashi et al 2015;Tinwell & Sloan 2014]; 6. entities that elicit the concept human but have nonhuman traits [Steckenfinger & Ghazanfar 2009]; and 7. difficulty distinguishing between categories, such as human and robot, or a conflict between categories Cheetham et al 2011Cheetham et al , 2014Cheetham et al 2015;].…”

StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement

“…Several parent-AI collaborative mechanisms in StoryBuddy help parents ensure that the generated questions (1) are appropriate for their child; and (2) can serve the intended goals parents have. Previous systems also lack support for flexible parent involvement, which is a key user need according to both prior literature [41] and our formative study findings. StoryBuddy's two distinct modes support situations for both when the parent is present and when the parent is absent.…”

Artificial Intelligence and Its Role in Education

“…Social robots perform many tasks in the context of social interaction by evoking social responses from humans [35]. They work in collaboration with humans in many dimensions of life, and education is one of them [36].…”