Move over, Aristotle

Ask Delphi is a bot that’s been fed more than 1.7m examples of people’s ethical judgments on everyday questions and scenarios. If you pose an ethical quandary, it will tell you whether something is right, wrong, or indefensible. Anyone can use Delphi.

 Users just put a question to the bot on its website, and see what it comes up with.

 The AI is fed a vast number of scenarios – including ones from the popular Am I The Asshole sub-Reddit, where Reddit users post dilemmas from their personal lives and get an audience to judge who the asshole in the situation was. Then, people are recruited from Mechanical Turk – a market place where researchers find paid participants for studies – to say whether they agree with the AI’s answers.

 Each answer is put to three arbiters, with the majority or average conclusion used to decide right from wrong. The process is selective – participants have to score well on a test to qualify to be a moral arbiter, and the researchers don’t recruit people who show signs of racism or sexism.

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