Chatbot Abuse Typologies: A Scoping Review

Chatbots can increase service efficiency and reduce operational costs in many industries, such as healthcare, banking, retail, as well as in tourism and leisure. However, the increase in chatbot use creates additional opportunities for chatbot abuse. Abuse directed at chatbots is a complex phenomenon entangled with ethical implications, potentially resulting in harm to humans/users. Despite a growing body of related research, there are no purpose-made frameworks or typologies for describing and analyzing chatbot abuse. Prompted by the absence of a useful theoretical tool, we conducted a scoping review. We synthesize previous research to begin building a typology of chatbot abuse – identifying how chatbot abuse and associated harms have been described and labelled, and the topics addressed in chatbot abuse research. Our work also identifies additional factors (the relational nature of chatbot abuse and the marginalized role of interaction contexts) that may enrich such a typology, suggesting future research trajectories.