The advent of generative artificial intelligence and the widespread adoption of it in society engendered intensive debates about its ethical implications and risks. These risks often differ from those associated with traditional discriminative machine learning. To synthesize the recent discourse and map its normative concepts, I conducted a scoping review on the ethics of generative artificial intelligence, including especially large language models and text-to-image models. The paper is available as a preprint on arXiv, accessible via this link. It provides a taxonomy of 378 normative issues in 19 topic areas and ranks them according to their prevalence in the literature. The new study offers a comprehensive overview for scholars, practitioners, or policymakers, condensing the ethical debates surrounding fairness, safety, harmful content, hallucinations, privacy, interaction risks, security, alignment, societal impacts, and others.
Discussing the regulation of generative AI
A panel discussion about regulating generative AI systems, in which I took part, is available for viewing on YouTube (in German).
Superhuman intuitions in language models
Our most recent paper on human-like intuitive decision-making in language models was published at Nature Computational Science. The research is also featured in a newspaper article (in German). We show that large language models, most notably GPT-3, exhibit behavior that strikingly resembles human-like intuition – and the cognitive errors that come with it. However, language models with higher cognitive capabilities, in particular ChatGPT, learned to avoid succumbing to these errors and perform in a hyperrational, superhuman manner. For our experiments, we probe language models with tests that were originally designed to investigate intuitive decision-making in humans.
News
++++ Sarah Fabi and I updated the paper on human-like intuitive decision-making and errors in large language models by testing ChatGPT, GPT-4, BLOOM, and other models – here’s the new manuscript +++ I co-authored a paper on privacy literacy for the new Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media +++ Together with Leonie Bossert, I published a paper on the ethics of sustainable AI +++ I got my own article series at Golem, called KI-Insider, where I will regularly publish new articles (in German) +++ I attended two further Science Slams in Friedrichshafen and Tübingen and won both of them +++ I was interviewed for a podcast about different AI-related topics (in German) +++
ChatGPT
Recently, I had several opportunities to be interviewed about ChatGPT and GPT-4, the powerful language model from OpenAI. You can read or hear the articles at heise, MDR, SWR, NDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Wirtschaftswoche, Stimme, Der Standard, taz, rnd, and WELT. I also wrote an article myself.