Most people would not prefer to take ethical advice from a computer, but a new Wharton study shows how attitudes change when users see how good AI guidance can be.
2 min. read
Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch used to love the long-running advice column in The New York Times, “The Ethicist,” until 2023. That’s the year he and two colleagues at Penn’s Wharton School conducted an experiment to see whether people could tell the difference between Kwame Anthony Appiah’s advice or advice spit out by ChatGPT.
In a blind study, even experienced professionals could not tell whether the AI-generated advice was more or less useful than the advice provided by Appiah. In fact, random participants preferred the AI-generated advice 59.6% of the time. An additional study found that participants who were initially resistant to taking advice from the chatbot became more accepting as they were shown the high quality of the AI reasoning.
“I stopped reading his column ever since I ran the experiment. It really did something to my brain,” says Terwiesch, a professor of operations, information and decisions and co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. “I have all the respect in the world for Dr. Appiah and other ethical experts who provide people with ethical advice that helps us live in a better world. But knowing that I might as well ask ChatGPT for the advice has taken the fun out of reading the original. Dr. Appiah was kind enough to respond to us when we exchanged emails with him after the study. He attributes this result to the AI’s persuasiveness and its ability to have found a ‘cultural average’ through its broad training. I agree with him—in this study and others we find that AI models have gotten really good at communicating with us and really capable of finding our sweet spots.”
Terwiesch’s latest paper, “Advice Quality and Source Disclosure Shape Trust in AI-Generated Ethical Advice,” appears in the journal Scientific Reports. Co-authors are Wharton marketing professor Gideon Nave and Lennart Meincke, principal investigator at Wharton’s Generative AI Labs and a research fellow at the Mack Institute.
The scholars say most people are comfortable with letting AI make objective, data-driven decisions, similar to relying on a calculator or a spreadsheet. But they’re skeptical about its ability to make subjective moral or ethical decisions requiring context and nuance. The study shows that this “algorithmic aversion” is malleable: The more people are exposed to AI’s guidance, the more they trust it.
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