The Ethics of Generative AI

Abstract: This chapter discusses the ethics of generative AI. It provides a technical primer to show how generative AI affords experiencing technology as if it were human, and this affordance provides a fruitful focus for the philosophical ethics of generative AI. It then shows how generative AI can both aggravate and alleviate familiar ethical concerns in AI ethics, including responsibility, privacy, bias and fairness, and forms of alienation and exploitation. Finally, the chapter examines ethical questions that arise specifically from generative AI's mimetic generativity, such as debates about authorship and credit, the emergence of as-if social relationships with machines, and new forms of influence, persuasion, and manipulation.