9 In addition, the vast majority of respondents had at least a 4-year college degree and around 10% had professional degrees or doctorates. Around one third of the participants regularly use ChatGPT. Most participants do not regularly read the NYT Ethics column, but around 10% do. We acknowledge that this group is not representative of the general public. Rather, participants self-selected into participating in our study. Participants were offered $15 for evaluating the advice to 10 ethical dilemmas and filling out a short survey. Pool 2 consists of a set of 90 MBA students at the Wharton School who were enrolled in an MBA class taught by the first author. Participation was entirely optional and anonymous. Students were asked to evaluate the advice for up to 10 ethical dilemmas and then complete the survey. We used an expert panel as Pool 3. Specifically, we recruited a panel of 18 experts consisting of four pastors, a rabbi, and 13 academics from well-known universities. To reduce the likelihood of experts being NYT readers, we mostly rely on academics from outside the US (only three are from the US). We offered experts $250 for their participation in the form of an Amazon gift card for themselves or a charitable organization. Second, we varied the way raters evaluated the ethical advice. In the “absolute evaluation” condition, raters were shown a randomly picked dilemma followed by a piece of advice, which was randomized to be either AI generated, i.e. the advice generated by GPT-4, or human generated, i.e. the advice provided by Dr. Appiah. Raters were then asked to score the usefulness of the advice on a scale from 1 to 7. In the “relative evaluation” condition, raters were shown both, the AI generated and the human generated advice. No indication was provided about the origin of the advice or that one might be AI generated. Raters were then asked to choose whichever advice they perceived as more useful for the person facing the ethical dilemma. Following the evaluation of the ethical advice, we asked participants a number of survey questions. The last two survey questions asked participants about whether or not they are readers of the NYT column “The Ethicist” and how often they are using ChatGPT. Our study was deceptive in as far as it did not reveal at any time that some of the advice was generated by a human expert while other was generated by AI. Looking at the comments we got from MBA students and experts in their responses to our email invitation to participate in this experiment, most subjects eventually “saw through” this study design by the time they completed the ratings. Nevertheless, consistent with other studies, subjects reported being unable to distinguish between the human generated advice and the expert advice.
Can AI Provide Ethical Advice? Page 8 Page 10