Language-enabled robots with moral reasoning capabilities will inevitably face situations in which they have to respond to human commands that might violate normative principles and could cause harm to humans. We present research in both engineering language-enabled robots that can engage in rudimentary rejection dialogues, as well as related HRI research into the effectiveness of robot protest. And we argue that how rejections are phrased is important and review the factors that should guide natural language formulations of command rejections.
@article{briggsetal21ijsr,
title={Why and how robots should say 'no'},
author={Gordon Briggs and Tom Williams and Ryan Blake Jackson and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2021},
journal={International Journal of Social Robotics},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/briggsetal21ijsr.pdf}
}