  The emergence of agentic technologies (e.g., robots) in increasingly public
realms (e.g., social media) has revealed surprising antisocial tendencies in
human-agent interactions. In particular, there is growing indication of
people's propensity to act aggressively towards such systems - without
provocation and unabashedly so.
  Towards understanding whether this aggressive behavior is anomalous or
whether it is associated with general antisocial tendencies in people's broader
interactions, we examined people's verbal disinhibition towards two artificial
agents. Using Twitter as a corpus of free-form, unsupervised interactions, we
identified 40 independent Twitter users who tweeted abusively or non-abusively
at one of two high-profile robots with Twitter accounts (TMI's Bina48 and
Hanson Robotics' Sophia). Analysis of 50 of each user's tweets most proximate
to their tweet at the respective robot (N=2,000) shows people's aggression
towards the robots to be associated with more frequent abuse in their general
tweeting. The findings thus suggest that disinhibition towards robots is not
necessarily a pervasive tendency, but rather one driven by individual
differences in antisociality. Nevertheless, such unprovoked abuse highlights a
need for attention to the reception of agentic technologies in society, as well
as the necessity of corresponding capacities to recognize and respond to
antisocial dynamics.
