Category: Artificial Intelligence

Posted on

Euclid and Moira Tell Stories

Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly convincing conversational partners, but can they also become good storytellers? This intriguing question will be explored at New Scientist Live 2026 in London during the Family session “Science Bites: Why are robots bad story tellers?” on October 10 from 12:40 to 1:20 p.m. Computer scientist Dr. Carl Strathearn and lecturer and computer scientist Emilia Sobolewska will present their two AI-powered humanoid robots, Euclid and Moira, and let them engage in a live conversation. While today’s AI systems can generate impressive text, storytelling remains a difficult challenge because compelling narratives require contextual understanding, shared knowledge, creativity, and the ability to connect ideas in meaningful ways. During the demonstration, the two robots will exchange thoughts and ideas, and the audience may even witness them gradually drifting into hallucinations and constructing a shared fantasy world. The researchers hope that these spontaneous interactions could offer new insights into how imagination and creativity might emerge in autonomous AI systems. Euclid has already attracted considerable attention this summer as one of the highlights of the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR + Art 2026) in London, where visitors were able to interact directly with the advanced humanoid robot. Developed by Carl Strathearn and Emilia Sobolewska, Euclid combines automatic speech recognition, computer vision, generative AI, skin sensors, and an innovative robotic mouth that produces highly realistic speech movements through machine learning. Unlike many famous humanoid robots with idealized faces, Euclid deliberately represents an older man with deeply lined features, challenging established design conventions while emphasizing authenticity, diversity, and natural human interaction. The upcoming New Scientist Live session now offers another opportunity to experience Euclid in action, this time in an experiment that explores one of the most fascinating frontiers of artificial intelligence: whether machines can move beyond generating language and begin creating genuinely imaginative stories together

Posted on

Terms and Concepts Introduced by Oliver Bendel

Since 2012, Oliver Bendel has introduced or significantly shaped a number of terms and concepts in academic discourse, particularly in the fields of machine ethics, social robotics, and the philosophy of technology. The Munchausen machine (Münchhausen-Maschine) refers to an immoral machine that systematically generates or disseminates falsehoods. The LIEBOT (LÜGENBOT) is a specific implementation of this concept. It is a chatbot conceived by Bendel and realized as a prototype that systematically tells lies. The project was used to explore the capabilities, risks, and ethical implications of deceptive dialogue systems. The reversed cyborg, also referred to as the inverted cyborg, describes the counterpart of the classical cyborg: instead of integrating technical structures into biological ones, it incorporates biological structures into technical ones. Robot enhancement refers to the deliberate extension and improvement of robots by adding sensory, motor, cognitive, or communicative capabilities and constitutes the counterpart to human enhancement. A wearable social robot is a social robot that is worn on the body or attached to clothing and accompanies its user through communication, assistance, or social interaction in everyday life. With “mythomorphic design”, Bendel describes an approach to robot design in which the models are drawn not from humans or animals but from figures found in mythology, fantasy, or science fiction. Animal-Machine Interaction (AMI) is a field of research and application that Bendel has significantly shaped, though he did not coin the term itself. It systematically examines interactions between animals and machines while addressing both technical and ethical issues. Its primary focus is the design and development of machines for interaction with animals rather than the study of animals themselves, extending to the creation of animal-friendly machines. Machine ethics also plays an important role in this field. The proxy machine with proxy morality is a concept in machine ethics according to which a machine acts as a moral proxy by executing moral rules defined by humans, without itself possessing consciousness or responsibility. Other important approaches in this field include annotated decision trees and morality menus (Photo: Jork Weismann).

Posted on

More News of the World

In 1977, Queen released the album “News of the World”. Its cover likely fascinated or disturbed many teenagers and adults at the time, a reaction that later found its way into popular culture – for example, in the animated sitcom “Family Guy”, where Stewie is terrified of it. The artwork depicts a gigantic humanoid robot holding two dead people in its right hand while blood drips from its left. Science fiction artist Frank Kelly Freas had already used a similar motif in one of his earlier works. Brian May has repeatedly emphasized that “News of the World” represented a deliberate stylistic shift for the band – more direct, rawer, and more contemporary. The cover art clearly reflected that new direction. The guitarist has always been as passionate about science fiction as he is about the reality of outer space. In 2007, after a long interruption, he completed his Ph.D. at Imperial College London with a dissertation on interplanetary dust. A few months ago, he was interviewed for the book “RE:VIEW: Wozu die Menschheit retten? (RE:VIEW: Why Save Humanity?)”. The book’s first section features extensive ESA imagery from the AI-supported planetary defense mission Hera, complemented by works of AI-generated art. In the second section, Hera’s own AI system takes on the role of interviewer, conducting “thirty in-depth conversations with figures from the worlds of art, science, philosophy, and society” (publisher’s description, own translation). In addition to Brian May – who was thus able to discuss both science fiction and the reality of space – the interviewees include, among others, the world’s first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari, “Interstellar” visionary Paul Franklin, PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, science fiction author Andreas Eschbach, artist Jonathan Meese, and technology philosopher and machine ethics expert Oliver Bendel. The book is being published by We Mind Publishing in collaboration with the agency Jung von Matt. It is already listed on Amazon, where extensive information about the book is now available, and is scheduled for release in September 2026.

Posted on

Artificial Life and the Virtual Girlfriend

In 1999, Oliver Bendel moved from an institute in Trier to the University of St. Gallen, where he took a position as a project manager and doctoral researcher. At first, he planned to write his dissertation on learning and knowledge portals. However, he soon decided to pursue a different topic. From an early age, he had been fascinated by chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots. Some he knew from science fiction, while others he had encountered firsthand through observation and use. What fascinated him were not only the dialogue systems themselves, with which he had been experimenting since 1996, but also their visualizations and embodiments. He devoted his research to pedagogical agents – that is, chatbots, voice assistants, and AI agents in learning environments. He also examined emotion recognition systems and the earliest social robots. He devoted several pages to the company Artificial Life. Beginning in 1999, the company gained recognition with Einstein, an educational application distributed on CD-ROM. The chatbot was paired with a realistic-looking avatar that guided users through the life and work of the famous physicist from Ulm. At the beginning of the new millennium, the company made headlines again with another product: the Virtual Girlfriend for mobile phones designed for the then newly introduced 3G network. Users could care for her much like a Tamagotchi, which had been introduced a few years earlier, and they could buy her gifts – expensive ones, of course. For many years, she was available at v-girl.com. By that time, a number of companies had already discovered that users flirted with chatbots and their avatars, asking them how old they were, whether they had a boyfriend, and whether they were interested in a relationship. Artificial Life deliberately built on this phenomenon, creating an artifact that was as visionary as it was problematic, designed to foster profound emotional dependence within a one-sided relationship. Oliver Bendel later explored these issues in numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2020, Springer Gabler published his book “Maschinenliebe (Machine Love)“. It summarized the state of research at the time on chatbots, love dolls, and sex robots.

Posted on

Giving Endangered Languages a Digital Future

Since 2012, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (FHNW School of Business) has initiated and implemented a wide variety of chatbots and voice assistants. These systems have been covered by the media and have even attracted the interest of NASA. His theoretical foundation and practical expertise stem from his doctoral dissertation on this topic, which dates back a quarter of a century. Since 2022, his focus has been on dialogue systems for dead and endangered languages. This work has resulted in @ve, a chatbot for Latin (implemented by Karim N’Diaye), @llegra, a voice-enabled chatbot for Vallader, a variety of Romansh (implemented by Dalil Jabou), and kAIxo, a voice-enabled chatbot for Basque (implemented by Nicolas Lluis Araya). In addition, Oliver Bendel is experimenting with chatbots for extinct languages such as Egyptian and Akkadian. On April 8, 2026, his article “Chatbots for Dead, Endangered, and Extinct Languages: Possibilities and Limitations of Generative AI for Continuing Education” was published in Wiley Industry News. The article focuses on the question of how chatbots based on generative AI can contribute to the preservation and promotion of dead, endangered, and extinct languages in continuing education, as well as in formal education. Oliver Bendel is also involved in the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons’ IdiomVoice project, which will be presented on June 17, 2026, at the GRdigital Project Showcase during an evening networking reception. Visitors to the showcase will have the opportunity to explore the current prototype and interact directly in Sursilvan with the two chatbot characters, Lina and Brida. With @llegra, Lina, and Brida, Graubünden has gained several digital ambassadors for its Romansh idioms.

Posted on

Off the Record

After generative AI, robotics is the topic of the moment – and, of course, the two can be combined. On May 21, 2026, Walder Wyss hosted a robotics event at Kraftwerk Zurich as part of its “Off the Record” series, beginning at 6:00 p.m. Friends and clients of the law firm were invited to attend. The discussion covered traditional service robots as well as general-purpose robots—and social robots. The panel featured Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, a philosopher of technology and business information systems scholar who has been working extensively with chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots for decades, and Sylvia Stocker, CEO of Arabesque. The event was moderated by Ramona Wyss and Florian Gunz. Since May 27, 2026, photographs from the event have been available. They feature not only the speakers and moderators but also several of the robots present at the venue, including Unitree G1, Mars, and Pepper. In its corporate brochure, the law firm describes itself as follows: “We are a dynamic law firm with flat structures and a very friendly atmosphere. More than 300 legal experts make Walder Wyss one of the most successful Swiss commercial law firms. Our clients include national and international companies, publicly held corporations and family businesses as well as public law institutions and individuals.” (Photo: Walder Wyss)

Posted on

From Machine Ethics to EU Law

In Article 50, “Transparency Obligations for Providers and Deployers of Certain AI Systems”, of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, it is stated: “Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use.” On this subject, the European Parliament had already been advised ten years earlier by Oliver Bendel. In his lecture “Moral and Immoral Machines – Moralische und unmoralische Maschinen” in Brussels on September 8, 2016, he presented GOODBOT, a chatbot initiated by him in 2013 in the context of machine ethics, which featured several escalation levels while repeatedly making clear that it was merely a machine. At the Digital Europe Working Group Conference Robotics on November 8, 2017, Bendel also spoke online about related questions in machine ethics. In connection with a care robot, he raised the question: “Should the robot make clear that it’s just a machine?” The transparency obligations set out in Article 50 will enter into force on August 2, 2026.

Posted on

Authentic and Non-Authentic Laughter

The paper “Reading Between the Laughs: A Human-Referenced Audio Evaluation of MLLMs for Social Robotics” by Sahan Hatemo, Katharina Kühne, and Oliver Bendel has been accepted at ICSR + Art 2026. In this work, the researchers investigated whether today’s leading AI models can distinguish authentic from non-authentic laughter based solely on audio signals. The results revealed striking differences in model behavior: OpenAI systems showed a strong tendency to interpret most laughter as genuine, while Gemini models were generally more skeptical. Despite these contrasting biases, several models performed significantly better than chance, with Gemini 2.5 Pro achieving the strongest overall results. Their analysis also demonstrated that less capable models often relied on superficial cues such as pitch, disproportionately labeling higher-pitched laughter as less authentic, whereas the top-performing model appeared to focus on more sophisticated voice quality features, suggesting a deeper understanding of laughter authenticity. These findings highlight the growing potential of multimodal large language models in social robotics, where accurately interpreting subtle social signals like laughter could play an important role in trust, communication, and relationship building between humans and robots. The 18th International Conference on Social Robotics will take place in London, UK, from 1-4 July 2026. ICSR is the leading international forum that brings together researchers, academics, and industry professionals from across disciplines to advance the field of social robotics.

Posted on

Ukraine Expands Use of Military Robots

According to German tech publication Golem.de, Ukraine says it has captured a Russian position for the first time using only unmanned systems, including ground robots and drones, in what could mark a significant milestone in modern warfare. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the operation as another sign of how rapidly battlefield technology is evolving, although independent confirmation of the exact circumstances remains limited. Ukraine has increasingly relied on robotic systems in recent months, with unmanned platforms reportedly being used for combat missions, reconnaissance, and even prisoner captures. The country’s defense-tech sector now includes hundreds of manufacturers developing a wide range of unmanned ground vehicles, highlighting Kyiv’s growing focus on automation and battlefield innovation. More details are available via www.golem.de.

Posted on

Chatbots for Endangered Languages

On April 8, 2026, the article “Chatbots for Dead, Endangered, and Extinct Languages: Possibilities and Limitations of Generative AI for Continuing Education” by Oliver Bendel was published in Wiley Industry News. The focus is on how chatbots based on generative AI can contribute to the preservation and promotion of dead, endangered, and extinct languages in continuing education (as well as in vocational training). Following an introduction to the technical and conceptual foundations, several projects at the FHNW School of Business are presented and discussed from technical, ethical, and didactic perspectives. These dimensions are revisited in the next section and expanded into general and overarching considerations. Finally, possible and necessary steps are outlined that go beyond the purely technological discourse. Additionally, an outlook is provided on future possibilities related to new versions of large language models. This article provides the first comprehensive overview of the projects initiated by Oliver Bendel that are dedicated to dead, endangered, and extinct languages, including @ve (for Latin), @llegra (for Vallader), and kAIxo (for Basque), as well as Cleop@tr@ (Egyptian). It can be accessed via the publisher’s website or downloaded here as a PDF.