Can AI Provide Ethical Advice?

Co-Brand Name Can AI Provide Ethical Advice? Christian Terwiesch (terwiesch@wharton.upenn.edu) and Lennart Meincke (lennart@sas.upenn.edu) October 2023 Mack Institute for Innovation Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 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. Acknowledgments: The authors gratefully acknowledge the help of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amy Sepinwall, Arianna Dini, Schaunel Steinnagel and others participating in the study as experts and/or providing us with feedback. Introduction In recent decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has made notable strides in emulating and, in several instances, surpassing human intelligence across diverse domains. Milestones in this development include IBM's Deep Blue beating Grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM's Watson clinching victory in Jeopardy in 2011, DeepMind's AlphaGo defeating Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, and the proficiency of ChatGPT in a myriad of academic examinations by 2022. In 2023, GPT-4 demonstrated an ability to generate creative ideas as well as to provide solid medical advice. But can and should AI provide us with ethical advice? On the one hand, one might think of ethical advice as yet another bastion to be taken by technology. Providing ethical advice typically happens through the use of language and thereby