Op-Ed: How AI's growing influence can make humans less moral (via latimesopinion)
to achieve a confession. Those using AI-powered sales strategies may not be aware that deceptive tactics are part of the marketing strategies the AI system promotes.
Making use of AI in these cases, of course, differs markedly from outsourcing tasks to fellow humans. For one, the exact workings of an AI system’s decisions are often invisible and incomprehensible. Letting such “black box” algorithms perform tasks on one’s behalf increases ambiguity and plausible deniability, thus blurring the responsibility for any harm caused.
The dangerous trifecta of opacity, anonymity and distance makes it easier for people to turn a blind eye to what AI is doing, as long as AI provides them with benefits. As a result, whenever AI systems take over a new social role, new risks for corrupting human behavior will emerge. Interacting with and through intelligent machines might exert an equally strong, or even stronger, pull on people’s moral compass than when interacting with other humans.
Instead of rushing to create new AI tools, we need to better understand these risks, and to promote the norms and the laws that will mitigate them. And we cannot simply rely on experience.Humans have been dealing with bad apples — and bad moral influences — for millennia. But the lessons we learned and the social rules we devised may not apply when the bad apples turn out to be machines. That’s a central problem with AI that we have not begun to solve.Max Planck Institute for Human Development.