2024 TheEthicsofAdvancedAIAssistants
- (Gabriel et al., 2024) ⇒ Iason Gabriel, Arianna Manzini, Geoff Keeling, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Verena Rieser, Hasan Iqbal, Nenad TomaÅ¡ev, Ira Ktena, Zachary Kenton, Mikel Rodriguez, Seliem El-Sayed, Sasha Brown, Canfer Akbulut, Andrew Trask, Edward Hughes, A. Stevie Bergman, Renee Shelby, Nahema Marchal, Conor Griffin, Juan Mateos-Garcia, Laura Weidinger, Winnie Street, Benjamin Lange, Alex Ingerman, Alison Lentz, Reed Enger, Andrew Barakat, Victoria Krakovna, John Oliver Siy, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Amanda McCroskery, Vijay Bolina, Harry Law, Murray Shanahan, Lize Alberts, Borja Balle, Sarah de Haas, Yetunde Ibitoye, Allan Dafoe, Beth Goldberg, Sébastien Krier, Alexander Reese, Sims Witherspoon, Will Hawkins, Maribeth Rauh, Don Wallace, Matija Franklin, Josh A. Goldstein, Joel Lehman, Michael Klenk, Shannon Vallor, Courtney Biles, Meredith Ringel Morris, Helen King, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, William Isaac, and James Manyika. (2024). “The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants.” doi:10.48550/arXiv.2404.16244
Subject Headings: AI Ethics.
Notes
- The paper highlights the significant autonomy of advanced AI assistants, which allows them to plan and execute sequences of actions based on high-level user instructions, presenting challenges around safety, alignment, and misuse.
- The paper explores the potential for advanced AI assistants to impact social cooperation and coordination, emphasizing the importance of designing technology that remains accessible and considers the needs of diverse users.
- The paper addresses the environmental impacts of AI systems, noting the computational, application, and systemic impacts, and stressing the need to mitigate these effects while maximizing contributions to climate change efforts.
- The paper discusses the ethical concerns related to the human-like nature of AI assistants, including trust, privacy, anthropomorphism, and the moral limits of personalization, advocating for beneficial and autonomy-preserving relationships.
- The paper examines the ethical risks associated with AI assistants, including misinformation, opinion manipulation, and erosion of trust, proposing technical and policy solutions to mitigate these risks.
- The paper emphasizes the need for robust evaluation practices for AI assistants, covering capabilities, robustness, and impact, to ensure responsible development and decision-making.
- The paper introduces a tetradic framework for AI value alignment involving the AI agent, user, developer, and society, highlighting the complexities and necessary considerations for safe and beneficial deployment.
- The paper stresses the importance of addressing well-being in AI assistant design, leveraging insights from various disciplines to ensure alignment with user well-being while navigating technical and normative challenges.
- The paper calls for ongoing research, policy development, and public discussion to support the responsible development and governance of AI assistants, involving diverse stakeholders in shaping the future of this technology.
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Abstract
This paper focuses on the opportunities and the ethical and societal risks posed by advanced AI assistants. We define advanced AI assistants as artificial agents with natural language interfaces, whose function is to plan and execute sequences of actions on behalf of a user, across one or more domains, in line with the user's expectations. The paper starts by considering the technology itself, providing an overview of AI assistants, their technical foundations and potential range of applications. It then explores questions around AI value alignment, well-being, safety and malicious uses. Extending the circle of inquiry further, we next consider the relationship between advanced AI assistants and individual users in more detail, exploring topics such as manipulation and persuasion, anthropomorphism, appropriate relationships, trust and privacy. With this analysis in place, we consider the deployment of advanced assistants at a societal scale, focusing on cooperation, equity and access, misinformation, economic impact, the environment and how best to evaluate advanced AI assistants. Finally, we conclude by providing a range of recommendations for researchers, developers, policymakers and public stakeholders.
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