A Rap on the Knuckles and a Twist in the Tale From Tweeting Affective Metaphors to Generating Stories with a Moral

Rules offer a convenient means of limiting the operational scope of our AI programs so as to not transgress predictable moral boundaries. Yet the imposition of an operational morality based on mere rules will not turn our machines into moral agents, just the unthinking tools of moral designers. If we are to imbue our machines with a profound functional morality, we must first gift them with a moral imagination, for empathic morality — where one agent treats another as it would want to be treated itself — requires an ability to project oneself into the realms of the counterfactual. In this paper we thus explore the role of the moral imagination in generating new and inspiring stories. The creation of novel tales with a built-in moral requires that an artificial system possess the ability to guess at the morality of characters and their actions in novel settings and events. Our moralizing tale-spinner — which generates Aesop-style tales about human-like animals with identifiable human qualities — also faces another challenge: it must render these tales as micro-texts that can be distributed as tweets. As we shall also use metaphor to lend elasticity to our moral conceptions, these short stories, rich in animal metaphors, will comprise part of the daily output of the @MetaphorMagnet Twitterbot.