Co-authored with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz.
Apologies serve important moral and social functions such as expressing remorse, taking responsibility, and repairing trusting relationships. LLM-based chatbots routinely produce output which has the linguistic form of an apology. However, chatbots are not the kind of linguistic or moral agents that could perform any of the functions listed above.
The first on-line draft of this paper was posted 11dec2024.