Moral Judgments Towards Artificial Intelligence Systems

Project dates (estimated):

Sep 2021 – Aug 2025

Name of the PhD student:

Yuxin Liu 

Supervisors:

Shannon Vallor – School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (Philosophy)
Adam Moore - School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (Psychology)

Project aims:

This project incorporates a psychological perspective on AI ethics to inform the moral/ethical design of AI systems in the near future, paying special attention to human moral judgments and intuitions towards artificial agents. It aims to investigate how the novel technology of AI may be used to reflect on human morality and to aid our decision-making.

Disciplines and subfields engaged:

  • Social and cognitive psychology

  • Moral psychology

  • Moral philosophy

  • AI ethics

  • Human-computer interaction

Research Themes:

  • Ethics of Human-Machine Interactions

    • Ethics of Automation

    • Ethics of Artificial Agent and Robot Design

    • Ethics of Knowledge Augmentation

  • Emerging Technology and Human Identity

    • AI, Automation and Human Wisdom

  • Emerging Technology, Health and Flourishing

    • Emerging Tech and Human Flourishing

Related outputs:

Grants and Awards:

  • ReproPsy fellowship programme: €1,000 for training in statistics and open science 

Conferences:

  • Presented on Artificial Moral Advisors and Moral Enhancement at the AI Ethics and Human-Computer Interaction Conference in Graz, Austria, March 6-7, 2024.

  • Accepted to present Intuitive Judgements Towards AI verdicts of Moral Transgressions at the International Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Symposium 2023 in Edinburgh.

  • ​Presented on the Moral Psychology behind Artificial Moral Advisors at the Moral Psychology and AI Conference 2023 in Kent.

  • ​Organising committee member for the Postgraduate Bioethics Conference 2023 in Edinburgh.

  • ​Presented On Moral AIs on the Mobilising Technomoral Knowledge panel at the Society for Philosophy & Technology Conference 2023 in Toyko.

  • Invited to present Artificial moral advisor and moral enhancement at Artificial Intelligence and the Christian Churches workshop in Edinburgh, 2023.

  • ​Presented Moral intuitions regarding the use of artificial intelligence at the 19th BPS Cognitive Section Annual Conference in Brighton, 2023.

  • ​Presented Artificial moral advisors: A new perspective from moral psychology at the 5th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society in Oxford, 2023.

  • Presented A Bayesian multilevel analysis of belief alignment effect predicting human moral intuitions of artificial intelligence judgements at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Toronto, 2023.

  • Presented Human moral judgements towards artificial intelligence systems at the 1st Doctoral Colloquium of the AI Ethics and Society Group in Edinburgh, 2023.

Peer-reviewed Publications:

  • Artificial moral advisors: A new perspective from moral psychology, Yuxin Liu, Adam B. Moore, Jamie Webb and Shannon Vallor AIES ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 2022 🔗

  • A Bayesian multilevel analysis of belief alignment effect predicting human moral intuitions of artificial intelligence judgements, Yuxin Liu and Adam B. Moore, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2022 🔗

  • Skill and self-knowledge: Empirical refutation of the dual-burden account of the Dunning–Kruger effect, Robert D. Mackintosh, Adam B. Moore, Yuxin Liu and Sergio Della Sala, Royal Society Open Science, 2022 🔗

PhD ResearchSteven ScottEthics of HMI, Tech and Human Identity, Tech and Flourishing