Can technology affect human morality? This is not an esoteric test question from a college philosophy class, but a real, growing concern among leading technologists and thinkers. Technologies like social media, smartphones, and artificial intelligence can create moral issues at scale, and technology experts specifically and society generally are struggling to navigate these issues. On the one hand, technology can empower us with better information on the consequences of our actions, as when we use the Internet to research how to reduce our environmental footprint. In the past, such information may have been inaccessible or impossible to source, but today we can easily arm ourselves with data that helps us make choices we perceive to be more moral.

AI shapes people's lives on a daily basis, setting prices in retail stores and making recommendations ranging from movies to romantic partners. But some question whether AI can become a corrupting force, even influencing people's behavior to the point that they break ethical rules. A fascinating study published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, Max Planck Institute, Otto Beisheim School of Management, and the University of Cologne aims to discover the degree to which AI-generated advice can lead people to cross moral lines. In a large-scale survey leveraging OpenAI's GPT-2 language model, the researchers found AI's advice can "corrupt" people even when they're aware the source of the advice is AI. Academics are increasingly concerned that AI could be co-opted by malicious actors to foment discord by spreading misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies. In a paper published by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies' Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC), the coauthors find that GPT-3, the successor to GPT-2, could reliably generate "informational" and "influential" text that might "radicalize individuals into violent far-right extremist ideologies and behaviors."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a trusted advisor in people's lives. A new concern arises if AI persuades people to break ethical rules for profit. Employing a large-scale behavioural experiment (N = 1,572), we test whether AI-generated advice can corrupt people. We further test whether transparency about AI presence, a commonly proposed policy, mitigates potential harm of AI-generated advice. Using the Natural Language Processing algorithm, GPT-2, we generated honesty-promoting and dishonesty-promoting advice. Participants read one type of advice before engaging in a task in which they could lie for profit. Testing human behaviour in interaction with actual AI outputs, we provide first behavioural insights into the role of AI as an advisor. Results reveal that AI-generated advice corrupts people, even when they know the source of the advice. In fact, AI's corrupting force is as strong as humans'.