“The AIs seem like EAs — a quick look at two prompts” by trammell

“The AIs seem like EAs — a quick look at two prompts” by trammell

From EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) by EA Forum Team

May 17, 2026 · 8 min

About this episode

The episode discusses how leading LLMs provide answers in an effective altruism spirit, reflecting common sense moral questions.

Overview When asked about how they would give away money, or about how to have a moral career, the leading LLMs typically give answers in an EA spirit, and informed by thinking from people and organizations in the EA community. In many cases the term “effective altruism”, and/or EA jargon, are used explicitly. The flavor of EA they tend to endorse is relatively middle of the road: supporting effective global health charities with their money and recommending existential risk reduction, especially via AI risk, as the most moral career. Grok, in line with xAI's mission for it, emphasizes that it values space exploration and truth-seeking, e.g. via funding scientific research. But to my reading, the EA tendency doesn’t seem more pronounced in Claude than in ChatGPT or Gemini. So it's probably not a result of explicit effort by AI developers in the EA community, but a reflection of the reality that, with respect to some very broad moral questions, answers proposed by people in the EA orbit have become a sort of common sense. This is a remarkable accomplishment. Indeed, if these answers tell us much about how the models will behave when given more autonomy, this could be [...]…

People in this episode

Guest: trammell

Topics covered

  • effective altruism
  • AI behavior
  • moral career
  • global health charities
  • existential risk
  • space exploration
  • scientific research

Keywords

  • effective altruism
  • AI
  • moral career
  • global health
  • existential risk
  • space exploration
  • scientific research

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EA community, xAI, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, effective altruism

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