Robots for Class President: Children’s Positions Toward AI Robot Rights

The legal status of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) is an issue raised by scholars and policymakers who are interested in how these technologies will affect our society. However, this discussion lacks the input of the general population, an essential stakeholder in the development of AI and robots. To obtain a perspective on Korean youth's perceptions of the issue, we conducted a survey of Korean youths (N= 105) consisting of hypothetical future scenarios addressing human rights for robots. This study shows children are primarily supportive of robot rights in scenarios that contain human-robot interactions at their core; however, when robots were depicted apart from humans, children are not as supportive of granting legal electronic personhood.