On April 26th – 11 CET – philosopher Katsunori Miahara from U Hokkaido will join our group seminar for talk titled “Should we respect chatbots? A virtue ethics analysis.“.
Abstract: In June 2022, a Google engineer made the headline for claiming that the company should treat their large language model, Language Model for Dialog Applications (LaMDA), as a person. A primary reason for this claim was the fact that LaMDA expressed the desire that it would like to be recognized and treated as such. This incident raises a puzzling ethical question: Should we listen to chatbots (powered by LLMs)? Are we morally required to treat their claims with respect? In this talk, I will explore this question from the perspective of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics approaches to the moral treatment of social robots comes in two forms. Call them the moral cultivation approach and the moral character approach. I will apply each to the question of respectful treatment of chatbots to clarify their implications. I argue that (i) the moral character approach is more useful as a normative framework; and (ii) it follows from this approach that we should refrain from listening to chatbots with respect and treat them as persons.
This talk is virtual – you can join with this link: https://unistuttgart.webex.com/unistuttgart/j.php?MTID=mde19516377e9748733da99a7e54fc475