Exploring Human-Robot Interaction Through Explainable AI Poetry Generation

Abstract: As the field of Artificial Intelligence continues to evolve into a tool of societal impact, a need of breaking its initial boundaries as a computer science discipline arises to also include different humanistic fields. The work presented in this thesis revolves around the role that explainable artificial intelligence has in human-robot interaction through the study of poetry generators. To better understand the scope of the project, a poetry generators study presents the steps involved in the development process and the evaluation methods. In the algorithmic development of poetry generators, the shift from traditional disciplines to transdisciplinarity is identified. In collaboration with researchers from the Research Institutes of Sweden, state-of-the-art generators are tested to showcase the power of artificially enhanced artifacts. A development plateau is discovered and with the inclusion of Design Thinking methods potential future human-robot interaction development is identified. A physical prototype capable of verbal interaction on top of a poetry generator is created with the new feature of changing the corpora to any given audio input. Lastly, the strengths of transdisciplinarity are connected with the open-sourced community in regards to creativity and self-expression, producing an online tool to address future work improvements and introduce nonexperts to the steps required to self-build an intelligent robotic companion, thus also encouraging public technological literacy. Explainable AI is shown to help with user involvement in the process of creation, alteration and deployment of AI enhanced applications.