The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants
Abstract
This paper focuses on the opportunities and the ethical and societal risks posed by advanced AI assistants. We define advanced AI assistants as artificial agents with natural language interfaces, whose function is to plan and execute sequences of actions on behalf of a user, across one or more domains, in line with the user's expectations. The paper starts by considering the technology itself, providing an overview of AI assistants, their technical foundations and potential range of applications. It then explores questions around AI value alignment, well-being, safety and malicious uses. Extending the circle of inquiry further, we next consider the relationship between advanced AI assistants and individual users in more detail, exploring topics such as manipulation and persuasion, anthropomorphism, appropriate relationships, trust and privacy. With this analysis in place, we consider the deployment of advanced assistants at a societal scale, focusing on cooperation, equity and access, misinformation, economic impact, the environment and how best to evaluate advanced AI assistants. Finally, we conclude by providing a range of recommendations for researchers, developers, policymakers and public stakeholders.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2404.16244,
title = {The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants},
author = {Iason Gabriel and Arianna Manzini and Geoff Keeling and Lisa Anne Hendricks and Verena Rieser and Hasan Iqbal and Nenad Tomašev and Ira Ktena and Zachary Kenton and Mikel Rodriguez and Seliem El-Sayed and Sasha Brown and Canfer Akbulut and Andrew Trask and Edward Hughes and A. Stevie Bergman and Renee Shelby and Nahema Marchal and Conor Griffin and Juan Mateos-Garcia and Laura Weidinger and Winnie Street and Benjamin Lange and Alex Ingerman and Alison Lentz and Reed Enger and Andrew Barakat and Victoria Krakovna and John Oliver Siy and Zeb Kurth-Nelson and Amanda McCroskery and Vijay Bolina and Harry Law and Murray Shanahan and Lize Alberts and Borja Balle and Sarah de Haas and Yetunde Ibitoye and Allan Dafoe and Beth Goldberg and Sébastien Krier and Alexander Reese and Sims Witherspoon and Will Hawkins and Maribeth Rauh and Don Wallace and Matija Franklin and Josh A. Goldstein and Joel Lehman and Michael Klenk and Shannon Vallor and Courtney Biles and Meredith Ringel Morris and Helen King and Blaise Agüera y Arcas and William Isaac and James Manyika},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.16244},
year = {2024}
}