The Ethics of Generative AI

TL;DR

This paper explores the ethical implications of generative AI, examining how it affects responsibility, privacy, bias, and social relationships, and discusses new ethical challenges unique to its mimetic capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a philosophical analysis of generative AI's ethical issues, highlighting how its unique features raise novel moral questions and concerns.

Findings

Generative AI can both worsen and improve ethical issues like bias and privacy.

It raises new questions about authorship, social relationships, and manipulation.

The chapter offers a framework for understanding AI ethics in the context of generative capabilities.

Abstract

This chapter discusses the ethics of generative AI. It provides a technical primer to show how generative AI affords experiencing technology as if it were human, and this affordance provides a fruitful focus for the philosophical ethics of generative AI. It then shows how generative AI can both aggravate and alleviate familiar ethical concerns in AI ethics, including responsibility, privacy, bias and fairness, and forms of alienation and exploitation. Finally, the chapter examines ethical questions that arise specifically from generative AI's mimetic generativity, such as debates about authorship and credit, the emergence of as-if social relationships with machines, and new forms of influence, persuasion, and manipulation.