Investigating machine moral judgement through the Delphi experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As our society adopts increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems for pervasive use, there are growing concerns about machine morality—or lack thereof. Millions of users already rely on the outputs of AI systems, such as chatbots, as decision aids. Meanwhile, AI researchers continue to grapple with the challenge of aligning these systems with human morality and values. In response to this challenge, we build and test Delphi, an open-source AI system trained to predict the moral judgements of US participants. The computational framework of Delphi is grounded in the framework proposed by the prominent moral philosopher John Rawls. Our results speak to the promises and limits of teaching machines about human morality. Delphi demonstrates improved generalization capabilities over those exhibited by off-the-shelf neural language models. At the same time, Delphi’s failures also underscore important challenges in this arena. For instance, Delphi has limited cultural awareness and is susceptible to pervasive biases. Despite these shortcomings, we demonstrate several compelling use cases of Delphi, including its incorporation as a component within an ensemble of AI systems. Finally, we computationally demonstrate the potential of Rawls’s prospect of hybrid approaches for reliable moral reasoning, inspiring future research in computational morality. Aligning artificial intelligence systems with human morality poses scientific, societal and ethical challenges. Delphi, an artificial intelligence system designed to predict human moral judgements based on John Rawls’s philosophical framework, is developed and tested, highlighting its potential for ethical applications and emphasizing the need to address its limitations and biases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".