Red Light, Grey Zone: A Multi-Perspective Interactive Narrative for Autonomous Driving Ethics

Mengyi Wei, Nianhua Liu, Chenyu Zuo, Liqiu Meng

Autonomous driving ethics is not only an expert concern, but also a public issue involving risk, responsibility, and governance. However, non-experts often struggle to interpret these issues in concrete incidents, especially when responsibility is distributed across multiple stakeholders. This paper investigates interactive narrative as a public-facing method for eliciting situated ethical reflection on autonomous driving. We present Red Light, Grey Zone, a web-based, multi-perspective interactive narrative prototype inspired by a real-world autonomous-driving incident. The prototype invites participants to compare stakeholder perspectives, examine scene materials, and make responsibility judgments in the face of ethical ambiguity. We report an exploratory user study (N=12) examining how differently non-experts responded to the prototype. Our analysis focuses on three dimensions of reflection: ethical cognition, responsibility-focused critical thinking, and multi-perspective reasoning. Exploratory pre-post results showed the strongest self-reported shift in responsibility-focused critical thinking among participants who completed the intended stakeholder-comparison process, while ethical cognition and multi-perspective reasoning showed positive directional trends. Qualitative findings further show how participants reflected on safety and market trade-offs, responsibility ambiguity, transparency and privacy, and governance gaps. Participants also used stakeholder comparison to corroborate evidence and, in many cases, broaden responsibility judgments from single-actor blame toward more distributed interpretations of accountability. Overall, the study suggests that multi-perspective interactive narratives may support non-expert reflection on accountability, evidence, and governance in AI-enabled systems.