Welcome to the 1st Workshop on
LLMs and HRI at RoMan!

The objectives of this workshop are to engage with questions arising at the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and human-robot interaction (HRI), and in particular related to social impact, ethical considerations and design of personality and behaviour. 

The integration of LLMs into social robotics relates to a larger trend in generative AI that potentially represents a significant shift in the field of HRI and social robotics, where LLMs are being increasingly implemented in a multitude of different applications, ranging from well-being and education to healthcare and business. This research trend offers several notable advantages, such as personalising and improving interactions, in particular open-domain dialogue, improving sentiment analysis for affective and emotional interaction as well as reducing reliance on manual methods such as the Wizard of Oz technique. 

However, integrating LLMs with social robots brings new complexities in design, particularly in shaping robot personality and behaviour to align with the diverse social and cultural norms and contexts in social robots. This trend carries ethical and societal concerns and it is vital to rigorously examine the potential risks and ethical issues associated with using LLMs in social robots, especially considering the impact on vulnerable communities. 

This workshop aims to contribute to the field of social robotics and to the RO-MAN community by providing insights into key design, ethical, and social impact considerations of LLM-integrated social robots. The integration of LLM-based technologies into social robots is a research field still in its infancy, and by early assessing these considerations, researchers will be able to mitigate potential risks and harms while properly taking advantage of the benefits as the field advances. It is timely and necessary to give room to discuss the social impact, design, and ethical considerations around privacy, autonomy, consent, and the potential for dependency on robotic systems. From a societal standpoint, the session will highlight the impact of LLM-integrated social robots on social dynamics, cultural norms, and human behaviour, prompting discussions on how these robots could influence human relationships and societal structures. Furthermore, this workshop will also address the need of value-sensitive design and design justice approaches that prioritise consent, contestability, human values, needs, and ethical considerations. Lastly, this session will discuss the normativity in robotic design, be it embodied or computational, which encompassess theorising how to deal with normative decisions in HRI. The potential impact of this workshop is substantial. It will not only broaden the community’s understanding of the ethical and societal dimensions of the integration of LLMs into HRI but also shape future research directions that prioritise ethical considerations that might often be overlooked in the design and implementation of these emerging technologies.