Ask Delphi

Ask Delphi is a research prototype designed and operated by the Allen Institute for AI to predict "how an “average” American person might judge the ethicality/social acceptability of a given situation, based on the judgments obtained from a set of U.S. crowdworkers for everyday situations."

The model was trained on questions published on a large corpus of content from the Internet, including Reddit communities r/AmITheAsshole and r/Confessions, and responses from gig workers on crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk.

It has been updated several times since it was first released in October 2021.

Transparency and accountability 🙈

The "Ask Delphi" app is seen to suffer from several transparency and accountability limitations:

• Algorithmic lack box. The AI oracle does not provide explanations for its moral judgments. Users receive simple verdicts without insight into the reasoning process or ethical frameworks applied. This "black box" nature makes it difficult to understand how the system arrives at its conclusions.

• Third-party oversight. As a proprietary system, Ask Delphi lacks external oversight or auditing. There is no transparency regarding the full extent of its training data, the specific machine learning models used, human curation or filtering of outputs

• Complaints and appeals. With no clear mechanisms for user feedback, error correction, or ongoing improvement, there is little accountability for the system's outputs or potential negative impacts.

Risks and harms 🛑

Delphi is seen to to misunderstand the context in which questions are being asked, produce nonsensical and unsafe responses, and exhibit overt racial, gender, religious and cultural stereotyping and bias.

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22734215/ai-ask-delphi-moral-ethical-judgement-demo

• https://stealthoptional.com/news/what-does-delphi-ai-think-of-star-treks-biggest-ethical-dilemmas/

• https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist

• https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/ai-delphie-video-game-biggest-choices

• https://www.techradar.com/news/ai-chatbot-justifies-sacrificing-colonists-to-create-a-biological-weaponif-it-creates-jobs

• https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist

• https://www.wired.com/story/program-give-ai-ethics-sometimes/

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/02/delphi-online-ai-bot-philosophy