The AI Ethicist: Fact or Fiction?; SSRN, Wharton University of Pennsylvania, November 20, 2023

 

Christian Terwiesch, University of Pennsylvania - Operations & Information Management Department, Lennart Meincke, University of Pennsylvania; The Wharton School, Gideon Nave

University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School; SSRN, Wharton University of Pennsylvania;

 The AI Ethicist: Fact or Fiction?

"Abstract

This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is done by evaluating the perceived usefulness of the ethical advice across three distinct groups: random subjects recruited from an online platform, Wharton MBA students, and a panel of ethical decision-making experts comprising academics and clergy. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference."

AI Chatbots Seem as Ethical as a New York Times Advice Columnist; Scientific American, July 1, 2024

DAN FALK, Scientific American ; AI Chatbots Seem as Ethical as a New York Times Advice Columnist

"In 1691 the London newspaper the Athenian Mercury published what may have been the world’s first advice column. This kicked off a thriving genre that has produced such variations as Ask Ann Landers, which entertained readers across North America for half a century, and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s weekly The Ethicist column in the New York Times magazine. But human advice-givers now have competition: artificial intelligence—particularly in the form of large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT—may be poised to give human-level moral advice.

LLMs have “a superhuman ability to evaluate moral situations because a human can only be trained on so many books and so many social experiences—and an LLM basically knows the Internet,” says Thilo Hagendorff, a computer scientist at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. “The moral reasoning of LLMs is way better than the moral reasoning of an average human.” Artificial intelligence chatbots lack key features of human ethicists, including self-consciousness, emotion and intention. But Hagendorff says those shortcomings haven’t stopped LLMs (which ingest enormous volumes of text, including descriptions of moral quandaries) from generating reasonable answers to ethical problems.

In fact, two recent studies conclude that the advice given by state-of-the-art LLMs is at least as good as what Appiah provides in the pages of the New York Times. One found “no significant difference” between the perceived value of advice given by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and that given by Appiah, as judged by university students, ethical experts and a set of 100 evaluators recruited online. The results were released as a working paper last fall by a research team including Christian Terwiesch, chair of the Operations, Information and Decisions department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania."