The Moral Dilemmas of AI with Michael Inzlicht

About this episode

The episode discusses the moral dilemmas of AI with Michael Inzlicht, focusing on the implications of AI's effectiveness and its impact on human values and interactions.

Mickey is BACK with two new papers he has co-authored, a bunch of opinions, and a very unwelcome idea: maybe the problem with AI isn't that it doesn't work but that it works too well! The first paper, Against Frictionless AI, argues that AI assistance and its ability to take away the effort from thinking, writing, and smooth out social(like) interactions could be robbing those activities of the very thing that makes them worthwhile. The second paper is a more empirical investigation that presents a bunch of studies examining the topic of the (alleged) moralisation of AI. Some findings suggest that opposition to AI among some people isn't really about risks or trade-offs but rather about non-negotiable sacred moral values. Who knew? We also discuss effort justification, reproducible research, robosexual allyship, and just how much humanity remains within the cyborg Matthew Browne. And remember... It's just like our opinion, man! Links Decoding Academia 34: Empathetic AIs? (Patreon Series) Ovsyannikova, D., Oldemburgo de Mello, V., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans . Communications Psychology, 3, Article 4. Zohar…

People in this episode

Host: Matthew Browne

Guest: Michael Inzlicht

Topics covered

• moral dilemmas of AI
• effort justification
• reproducible research
• sacred moral values
• AI ethics

Keywords

• AI
• moral dilemmas
• effort justification
• sacred values
• reproducible research
• robosexual allyship

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Decoding Academia

Books & works: Against Frictionless AI, The moralization of artificial intelligence, Communications Psychology

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