Mimetic Models: Ethical Implications of AI that Acts Like You
It addresses ethical implications for AI researchers, developers, and society regarding personalized AI models, but is incremental as it builds on existing ethical AI discussions.
The paper tackles the ethical and social issues of AI models that simulate specific individuals' behavior, developing a framework to characterize these concerns across various usage scenarios and stakeholders.
An emerging theme in artificial intelligence research is the creation of models to simulate the decisions and behavior of specific people, in domains including game-playing, text generation, and artistic expression. These models go beyond earlier approaches in the way they are tailored to individuals, and the way they are designed for interaction rather than simply the reproduction of fixed, pre-computed behaviors. We refer to these as mimetic models, and in this paper we develop a framework for characterizing the ethical and social issues raised by their growing availability. Our framework includes a number of distinct scenarios for the use of such models, and considers the impacts on a range of different participants, including the target being modeled, the operator who deploys the model, and the entities that interact with it.