Matthew Peter Aylett | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Faulty Coffees: Barriers to Adoption of an In-the-wild Robo-Barista

We set out to study whether task-based narratives could influence long-term engagement with a service robot. To do so, we deployed a Robo-Barista for five weeks in an over-50's housing complex in Stockton, England. Residents received a free daily coffee by interacting with a Furhat robot assigned to either a narrative or non-narrative dialogue condition. Despite designing for sustained engagement, repeat interaction was low, and we encountered curiosity trials without retention, technical breakdowns, accessibility barriers, and the social dynamics of a housing complex setting. Rather than treating these as peripheral issues, we foreground them in this paper. We reflect on the in-the-wild realities of our experiment and offer lessons for conducting longitudinal Human-Robot Interaction research when studies unravel in practice.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

"What do you expect? You're part of the internet": Analyzing Celebrities' Experiences as Usees of Deepfake Technology

Deepfake technology is often used to create non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII), mainly of celebrity women. Through Critical Discursive Psychological analysis we ask; i) how celebrities construct being targeted by deepfakes and ii) how they navigate infrastructural and social obstacles when seeking recourse. In this paper, we adopt Baumers concept of Usees (stakeholders who are non-consenting, unaware and directly targeted by technology), to understand public statements made by eight celebrity women and one non-binary individual targeted with NSII. Celebrities describe harms of being non-consensually targeted by deepfakes and the distress of becoming aware of these videos. They describe various infrastructural/social factors (e.g. blaming/ silencing narratives and the industry behind deepfake abuse) which hinder activism and recourse. This work has implications in recognizing the roles of various stakeholders in the infrastructures underlying deepfake abuse and the potential of human-computer interaction to improve existing recourses for NSII. We also contribute to understanding how false beliefs online facilitate deepfake abuse. Future work should involve interventions which challenge the values and false beliefs which motivate NSII creation/dissemination.

cs.HC↗