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Ethics Advice from GPT-4 Is Quite Good
At least, GPT-4 is able to give the same quality of advice that an expert gives. Both laypeople and ethics experts rated the GPT-4 advice quite highly.
This was similar to my experience when I first tested ChatGPT against some dilemmas from our book, The Business Ethics Field Guide. I found that the responses it generated were much better than the average BYU undergrad business student.
It’s worth noting that the dilemmas presented were short, text-based summaries. It would be interesting to see how well GPT-4 performs in an ongoing dialogue that invites more nuance. Still, it’s quite exciting to think of a day when expert ethics advice is there at everyone’s fingertips. Will people use it, though?
"This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is done by evaluating the perceived usefulness of the ethical advice across three distinct groups: random subjects recruited from an online platform, Wharton MBA students, and a panel of ethical decision-making experts comprising academics and clergy. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference."
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