Like other technology, generative AI effects on our values may be profound. – Psychology Today
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Posted May 31, 2024 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Are chatbots changing social morality?
Changes in social morality refer to changes in what people believe to be good and bad or right and wrong. Among the many ethical questions raised by chatbot development and use is their potential to influence social morality.
We know that technologies such as robots, computer interfaces, and algorithmic systems can have various psychological effects on us. They can cause us to lower our guard, make us feel less alone, and lead us to make all kinds of assumptions about reliability and value. But they can also have deeper, more long-lasting psychological effects that we usually don’t think about.
We know that technology has served as a “mediator” of moral change in many different ways, as Peter Verbeek (2012, 2013) and others have detailed. The smartphone is a common example. Its proliferation has shifted the value of our everyday experiences: Once, our social interactions with friends and colleagues were largely valuable in and of themselves, but now those interactions also have widely recognized instrumental value as content to be recorded, shared, and even monetized.
The presence of the smartphone has, in many ways, disrupted shared moral norms and expectations that previously defined everyday activities. “The technology has enabled this reinterpretation of the moral value of everyday experiences,” as some theorists describe it (Danaher & Sætra, 2022, p. 35).
Consider the concept of trust. Can we only trust other humans? We typically judge machines based on reliability, but what if we decide that a machine—a chatbot—is trustworthy? Dozens of books and articles have been written on how trust functions in a moral system.
Most recently, in 2022 (before the rollout of OpenAI’s ChatGPT), two technology theorists, John Danaher and Skaug Sætra, addressed the issue of how technology can affect our understanding of trust and its function in our social lives. Trust, they wrote, “is the keystone in our broader value system by facilitating productive cooperation and coordination. If we can trust others, we can enhance our autonomy, happiness, mental well-being, health, relationships, and so on….Trust is a way of signaling respect to another person. If we trust someone, we are respecting their honesty, their competence, and their status as a co-equal moral citizen” (2022, p. 35).
They identify several ways in which technology can influence or even undermine trust and the important role it plays in our social lives. Drawing from their analysis, we should all consider how chatbot development and use may, even now, be influencing our sense of trust.
References
Danaher, J., & Sætra, H.S. (2022). Technology and moral change: The transformation of truth and trust. Ethics and Information Technology 24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09661-y
Sundar, S.S., Jia, H., Waddell, T.F., & Huang, Y. (2015). Toward a theory of interactive media effects (TIME): Four models for explaining how interface features affect user psychology. In The handbook of the psychology of communication technology (S.S. Sundar, Ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 47-87.
Verbeek, P.P. (2012). Moralizing technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things. University of Chicago Press.
Verbeek, P.P. (2013). The moral status of technical artifacts. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology 155, p. 1-9.
Patrick Lee Plaisance, Ph.D., is the Don W. Davis Professor in Ethics at the Bellisario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University, and Editor of the Journal of Media Ethics.
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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.
