CFP: Games, Values and AI

*Notice: Extended deadline*

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from different backgrounds to explore the philosophical and social issues raised by games as inspiration, model, testbed or context for Artificial Intelligence.

Background

Artificial intelligence research has been linked with games at least since Claude Shannon proposed chess playing as an ideal problem for AI researchers to tackle. More recently, companies pursuing machine learning and AI today often use videogames as “model organisms” or “test environment”—i.e. as platforms for testing, developing and illustrating their accomplishments.

At the same time, artificial intelligence also plays an important role within the videogame industry. Videogame developers routinely create artificial agents that human players can interact with (or compete against), they implement AI technologies within games in other ways or use it in the generation of the game itself. Furthermore, the stories that are told within videogames draw on and shape narratives about the future of AI and impacts it might have on our lives.

Possible topics

We welcome contributions from any field of research that illuminates the philosophical and social dimensions of AI in relation to games. Possible topics include (but are in no way limited to):

• Ethical dimensions of AI and games.

• Are there limits to the kinds of fictive scenarios one ought to play out in videogames? (e.g. “gamer’s dilemma”, violence in videogames).

• Does it make a difference whether one is playing against humans or artificial agents?

• Is it possible to care for or have dependent relationships with AIs in games?

• Narratives of AI.

• How are AIs represented within the stories told by videogames?

• What narratives are promoted by AIs playing (and winning) against humans?

• How do videogames affect the reception and understanding of AI in society?

• Games in AI research.

• How have games influenced academic AI research?

• Methodological advantages and pitfalls of using games as “model organisms”.

• What notion of intelligence is promoted by focusing on game-playing?

• Intelligence and game-playing.

• Can videogames replace or complement the Turing Test?

• When can an AI be said to be acting (as opposed to merely producing an output)?

• Believability of AIs, e.g. can we distinguish the illusion of intelligence from truly intelligent or distinctively “human-like” playing?

• Aesthetics and art theory of games.

• What aesthetic value can AI bring to games?

• What would it take for an AI to be recognised genuinely creative?

• Is the distinction between game and reality challenged e.g. by the implementation of advanced AI or augmented reality?

Details

Submission format: Send a 200-300 word abstract (excluding references), prepared for anonymous review, together with separate documents containing contact details.

Submit to: [email protected], subject headline: “Games, Values and AI”.

Deadline for submission: 31 October 2017

*Extended deadline*: 6 November 2017.

Notification of acceptance: 10 November 2017

Workshop date: 15 December 2017