People are far more likely to lie and cheat when they use AI for tasks, according to an eyebrow-raising new study in the journal Nature.
“Using AI creates a convenient moral distance between people and their actions — it can induce them to request behaviors they wouldn’t necessarily engage in themselves, nor potentially request from other humans,” said behavioral scientist and study co-author Zoe Rahwan, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, in a statement about the research.
Who’s surprised by this?
If you use AI to do things for you that you could do yourself, fundamentally you cheat.
I’m not talking about a doctor asking AI to interpret some difficult medical data. In that case, AI is a tool.
But when you ask it to write a summary of the boring-ass meeting you just slept through, or code a piece of code you can’t be assed to understand properly yourself, or do your homework, you shortcut your responsibilities.
And at the core of the request lies a profound desire from the requestor to get a result without efforts, which is kind of morally bankrupt to begin with.
It’s not surprising in the slightest, but it’s good to have our suspicions validated. Unlike chatbots, we can base our actions on reality, rather than just vibes.
AI pushers know this on a fundamental level, and it pisses them off that you won’t go along with it. Same as not letting someone copy your homework in grade school.
More important than the cheating I think is just the outright offloading of thinking. Just the acceptance of no longer having thoughts without running them past the computer first, which itself I think is tied to this deep fear of being wrong about something.
My wife’s friend is having marriage issues. She wants to go to marriage counseling. He wants to use an AI marriage counselor.
Guys a dumbass that quit his job to start a Crypto currency business.
seems on brand for shitbags.
She needs a divorce lawyer.
He does too, but he’ll use Gemini or some shit