Why We Need to Destroy the Illusion of Speaking to A Human: Critical Reflections On Ethics at the Front-End for LLMs

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the ethical implications of designing AI chatbots that mimic human conversation, emphasizing the need to challenge the illusion of speaking to a human to promote ethical AI development.

Contribution

It highlights the ethical challenges of human-like AI interactions and proposes starting points for more ethical front-end AI design to prevent misleading perceptions.

Findings

Chatbots create misleading impressions of human-like understanding.

Designing AI to appear human can activate ethical concerns.

Proposes ethical guidelines for AI interaction design.

Abstract

Conversation with chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has become one of the major forms of interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in everyday life. What makes this interaction so convenient is that interacting with LLMs feels so natural, and resembles what we know from real, human conversations. At the same time, this seeming similarity is part of one of the ethical challenges of AI design, since it activates many misleading ideas about AI. We discuss similarities and differences between human-AI-conversations and interpersonal conversation and highlight starting points for more ethical design of AI at the front-end.