Artificial agents are progressively becoming more present in everyday-life situations and more sophisticated in their interaction affordances. In some specific cases, like Google Duplex, GPT-3 bots or Deep Mind’s AlphaGo Zero, their capabilities reach or exceed human levels. The use contexts of everyday life necessitate making such agents understandable by laypeople. At the same time, displaying human levels of social behavior has kindled the debate over the adoption of Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’. By means of a comparative analysis of the literature on robots and virtual agents, we defend the thesis that approaching these artificial agents ‘as if’ they had intentions and forms of social, goal-oriented rationality is the only way to deal with their complexity on a daily base. Specifically, we claim that this is the only viable strategy for non-expert users to understand, predict and perhaps learn from artificial agents’ behavior in everyday social contexts. Furthermore, we argue that as long as agents are transparent about their design principles and functionality, attributing intentions to their actions is not only essential, but also ethical. Additionally, we propose design guidelines inspired by the debate over the adoption of the intentional stance.

人工代理正逐渐出现在日常生活中，并且它们的交互能力也越来越复杂。在某些特定情况下，例如 Google Duplex、GPT-3 机器人或 Deep Mind 的 AlphaGo Zero，它们的能力达到或超过人类水平。日常生活的使用环境需要使这些代理能够被外行人理解。与此同时，展示人类社会行为水平引发了关于采用丹尼特“故意立场”的争论。通过对关于机器人和虚拟代理的文献进行比较分析，我们捍卫了以下论点，即接近这些人工代理“好像”他们有意图和形式的社会，面向目标的理性是处理其复杂性的唯一方法每日基地。具体来说，我们声称这是非专家用户在日常社交环境中理解、预测并可能从人工智能代理的行为中学习的唯一可行策略。此外，我们认为，只要代理对其设计原则和功能保持透明，将意图归因于他们的行为不仅是必不可少的，而且是合乎道德的。此外，我们提出了受关于采用有意立场的辩论启发的设计指南。