The corruptive force of AI-generated advice
This addresses the ethical risks of AI as an advisor in everyday life, highlighting a novel concern about AI-induced corruption.
The study investigated whether AI-generated advice can persuade people to act dishonestly for profit, finding that such advice corrupts individuals even when they are aware of its AI source, with an effect as strong as human advice.
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'.