When is it permissible for artificial intelligence to lie? A trust-based approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a trust-based normative framework to determine when it is ethical for conversational AI to lie, considering cultural norms and negotiation contexts, and discusses training AI to negotiate ethically.

Contribution

It introduces a trust-based ethical framework for AI lying, emphasizing cultural differences and outlines methods for training AI to negotiate ethically.

Findings

Cultural norms influence trust and lying in AI negotiations.

AI can be trained to negotiate ethically using large dialog datasets.

Trust invitation determines the ethicality of AI deception.

Abstract

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in industry settings can be trained to closely mimic human behaviors, including lying and deception. However, lying is often a necessary part of negotiation. To address this, we develop a normative framework for when it is ethical or unethical for a conversational AI to lie to humans, based on whether there is what we call "invitation of trust" in a particular scenario. Importantly, cultural norms play an important role in determining whether there is invitation of trust across negotiation settings, and thus an AI trained in one culture may not be generalizable to others. Moreover, individuals may have different expectations regarding the invitation of trust and propensity to lie for human vs. AI negotiators, and these expectations may vary across cultures as well. Finally, we outline how a conversational chatbot can be trained to negotiate ethically by applying autoregressive models to large dialog and negotiations datasets.