Each day, artificial intelligence gets a little better at impersonating us. It can express fears and hopes, write a novel about cats in the style of David Foster Wallace, suggest recipes for dinner, offer advice on getting over a breakup, drive a car, or sell you a couch. It also has the capacity to spread disinformation at scale and exhibit unhinged behavior in pursuit of a desired end. In 2016, the AI development company OpenAI documented a case in which a robot designed to play a boat-racing game learned that it could win by maximizing its score rather than finishing the course, which resulted in the robot’s boat “catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going the wrong way,” all in the name of victory.
The proliferation of ChatGPT and other popular AI programs has dumped a truckload of ethical, moral and philosophical questions on humanity’s…
