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Tagged: Artificial intelligence

AI / Education / Technology

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LLMs can be harmful, even when not making stuff up

This is a guest post by Joe Slater (University of Glasgow).

A screenshot of a phone, showing an AI generated summary in response to the question "How many rocks shall I eat".
Provided by author

It is well known that chatbots powered by LLMs – ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. – sometimes make things up. People have sometimes called these “AI hallucinations”. With my co-authors, I have argued that we should describe chatbots as bullshitting, in the sense described by Harry Frankfurt, i.e., the content is produced with an indifference to the truth. Because of this, developing chatbots that no longer generate novel false utterances (or reduce the proportion of false utterances they output) has been a high priority for big tech companies. We can see this in the public statements made by, e.g., OpenAI, boasting of reduced hallucination rates.

One factor that is sometimes overlooked in this discourse is that generative AI can also be detrimental in that it may stifle development, even when it accurately depicts the information it has been trained on.

Recall the instance of the Google AI overview, which is powered by Google’s Gemini LLM, claiming that “According to UC Berkeley geologists, you should eat at least one small rock per day”. This claim was initially made in the satirical news website, The Onion. While obviously false claims like this are unlikely to deceive, it demonstrates a problem. False claims may be repeated. Some of these could be ones that most people accept, or even that most experts accept. This poses serious problems.

In this short piece, I want to highlight three worries that might escape our notice if we focus only on chatbots making stuff up:

  1. Harmful utterances (true or otherwise),
  2. Homogeneity and diminished challenges to orthodox views (true or otherwise)
  3. Entrenched false beliefs
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AI / Economics / Social justice / Technology / Work

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Can entry-level jobs be saved by virtuous AI?

Photo credit: RonaldCandonga at Pixabay.com, https://pixabay.com/photos/job-office-team-business-internet-5382501/

This is a guest post by Hollie Meehan (University of Lancaster).

We have been warned by the CEO of AI company Anthropic that up to 50% of entry-level jobs could be taken by AI in the coming years. While reporters have pointed out that this could be exaggeration to drive profits, it raises the question of where AI should fit into society. Answering this is a complicated matter that I believe could benefit from considering virtue ethics. I’ll focus on the entry-level job market to demonstrate how these considerations can play an important role in monitoring our use of AI and mitigating the potential fallout.

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General

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Can Our Current Academic Model Go On in the Age of AI?

It has been almost three years since ChatGPT was released in the public arena amid great hopes, worries, and, perhaps more than anything, hype. While artificial intelligence tools, including of the Large Language Model variety to which ChatGPT belongs, were already deployed in many areas by then, it was this event that sparked both widespread obsession with AI and the subsequent pouring of trillions of dollars into AI development in just three years. Meanwhile, though still relatively in its infancy, Generative AI has indeed impacted numerous fields, and these include education and research, which together form the core dimensions of academia. Some of the concerns raised by the usage of Generative AI in academia, especially when it comes to student evaluations, have already been taken up on this blog, here, here, here, and here. In fact, out of all the Justice Everywehere posts focusing on AI in the past three years, exactly half looked at this particular problem, which is unsurprising, since on the one hand most of the contributors to this blog are educators, and on the other one that political philosophy is methodologically built around the capacity to engage in original thinking. In this post, which inaugurates the new season of Justice Everywhere, I want to signal a broader issue, which is – to put it bluntly – that key aspects of the way in which academia currently works are likely to be upended by AI in the near future. And, crucially, that as a collective, we seem to be dangerously inert in the face of this scenario.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2020/11/06/an-ai-robot-wrote-my-term-paper/
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General / Health / Moral values

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Is there anything wrong with allowing oneself to feel liked by a chatbot?

In this post, Emilia Kaczmarek (University of Warsaw) discusses her recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in which she explores the ethical implications of self-deception in emotional relationships of humans with AI entities.

Photo: Free to use by Mateusz Haberny.

The popularity of AI girlfriend apps is growing. Unlike multi-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, companion chatbots are designed to build relationships. They respond to social, emotional or erotic needs of their users. Numerous studies indicate that humans are capable of forming emotional relationships with AI, partly due to our tendency to anthropomorphize it.

The debate on the ethical aspects of human-AI emotional relations is multi-threaded. In my recent article, I focus only on one topic: the problem of self-deception. I want to explore whether there is anything wrong with allowing oneself to feel liked by a chatbot.

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Climate / General / Technology

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Why Conscious AI Would Be Bad for the Environment

Image credit to Griffin Kiegiel and Sami Aksu

This is a guest post by Griffin Kiegiel.

Since the meteoric rise of ChatGPT in 2021, artificial intelligence systems (AI) have been implemented into everything from smartphones and electric vehicles, to toasters and toothbrushes. The long-term effects of this rapid adoption remain to be seen, but we can be certain of one thing: AI uses a lot of energy that we can’t spare. ChatGPT reportedly uses more than 500,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity daily, which is massive compared to the 29 kilowatt-hours consumed by the average American household.

As the global temperature and ocean levels rise, it is our responsibility to limit our collective environmental impact as much as possible. If the benefits of AI don’t outweigh the risks associated with increasing our rate of energy consumption, then we may be obligated to shut down AI for the sake of environmental conservation. However, if AI becomes conscious, shutting them down may be akin to murder, morally trapping us in an unsustainable system.

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