The Moral Psychology of Artificial Intelligence

Moral psychology was shaped around three categories of agents and patients: humans, other animals, and supernatural beings. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has introduced a fourth category for our moral psychology to deal with: intelligent machines. Machines can perform as moral agents, making decisions that affect the outcomes of human patients or solving moral dilemmas without human supervision. Machines can be perceived as moral patients, whose outcomes can be affected by human decisions, with important consequences for human-machine cooperation. Machines can be moral proxies that human agents and patients send as their delegates to moral interactions or use as a disguise in these interactions. Here we review the experimental literature on machines as moral agents, moral patients, and moral proxies, with a focus on recent findings and the open questions that they suggest.

Boundary crossing: an experimental study of individual perceptions toward AIGC

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Generated Content has made great progress in many fields. Those AI art works gradually reshape contemporary understanding of creativity. The unique creative ability of human beings may also be challenged. This paper takes AIGC as the research object and carries out a grouping experiment based on 240 participants. We found that Anthropomorphism and Autonomy have no effect on the evaluation of AI paintings and AI "painter" identity, but in together their have a combined positive impact on both independent variables. The existence of moderating effect reveals the phenomenon of on-the-spot stimulation similar to the strong effect theory. Meanwhile, the evaluation of paintings positively affects the perception of AI "painter" identity. The subjectivity of AI comes from the double superposition of its external and inner characteristics, which may suggest AI with both human-like appearance and function can be regarded as a person with social role identity.

Effects of Using Artificial Intelligence on Interpersonal Perceptions of Job Applicants

Text-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly integrated into a host of interpersonal domains. Although decision-making and person perception in hiring and employment opportunities have been an area of psychological interest for many years, only recently have scholars begun to investigate the role that AI plays in this context. To better understand the impact of AI in employment-related contexts, we conducted two experiments investigating how the use of AI by applicants influences their job opportunities. In our preregistered Study 1, we examined how a prospective job applicants' use of AI, as well as their language status (native English speaker or non-native English speaker), influenced participants' impressions of their warmth, competence, social attractiveness, and hiring desirability. In Study 2, we examined how receiving assistance impacted interpersonal perceptions, and how perceptions might change whether the help was provided by AI or by another human. The results from both experiments suggest that the use of AI technologies can negatively influence perceptions of jobseekers. This negative impact may be grounded in the perception of receiving any type of help, whether it be from a machine or a person. These studies provide additional evidence for the Computers as Social Actors framework and advance our understanding of AI-Mediated Communication. The results also raise questions about transparency and deception related to AI use in interpersonal contexts.