Which Artificial Intelligences Do People Care About Most? A Conjoint Experiment on Moral Consideration

TL;DR

This study used a conjoint experiment with over a thousand participants to identify which AI features most influence moral consideration, highlighting human-like bodies and prosocial traits as most impactful.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of AI features affecting moral consideration, informing design of ethically considerate AI systems.

Findings

Human-like physical bodies significantly increase moral consideration.

Prosocial features like emotion expression and cooperation have large effects.

All AI features studied increase perceived moral wrongness of harm.

Abstract

Many studies have identified particular features of artificial intelligences (AI), such as their autonomy and emotion expression, that affect the extent to which they are treated as subjects of moral consideration. However, there has not yet been a comparison of the relative importance of features as is necessary to design and understand increasingly capable, multi-faceted AI systems. We conducted an online conjoint experiment in which 1,163 participants evaluated descriptions of AIs that varied on these features. All 11 features increased how morally wrong participants considered it to harm the AIs. The largest effects were from human-like physical bodies and prosociality (i.e., emotion expression, emotion recognition, cooperation, and moral judgment). For human-computer interaction designers, the importance of prosociality suggests that, because AIs are often seen as threatening, the highest levels of moral consideration may only be granted if the AI has positive intentions.