Omri Asscher

Recent years have seen a growing discrepancy in the field of AI alignment: research and policy recommendations on AI ethics tend to assume a general set of ethical values, yet proliferating practice-specific uses of AI systems on the ground - in the legal, medical and translation domains, among others - have been effectively manifesting ethics of professional practice. This article begins by outlining the reasons why general and professional ethics are increasingly conflicted in contemporary AI systems, and by surveying how the research literature attests to, but has not yet resolved, this conceptual and practical challenge. We then conceptualize the main dimensions of AI models’ decision-making in areas of professional practice, emphasizing professional ethics’ hierarchically structured relationship with general ethics, and elaborating on the mechanisms through which they reach an equilibrium in situational contexts that involve conflict. It is through this equilibrium, we suggest, that certain professional ethics are prioritized over others and implemented in practice. We then show how our framework can be the basis for a systematic empirical assessment of AI models’ professional ethics in various domains, identifying the nuances of the models’ favored ethic by examining their production in a series of similar but not identical scenarios. Finally, we propose a formulation for how to intervene in and change AI models’ favored ethics in professional practices – while noting the inherent dimension of subjectivity involved in both the evaluation and implementation of professional ethics in AI models.

The current article identifies the underlying themes in the budding discourse on the development of humanities-based research of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Three core themes, elicited from emerging voices in various humanistic disciplines, are summarized and consolidated as common grounds for approaching GAI production and effects as a principal object of humanistic inquiry: GAI’s human-like textual and semiotic outputs, deeply entangled as they are in the conceptual world of the humanities; the autonomous nature of GAI intellectual production; and the pervasive implications of GAI for human life, on both individual and collective levels. Grounded in the cross-disciplinary humanistic traditions of epistemological cautiousness about the possibility and necessity of pursuing internal reasoning and intentionality, these core themes serve as key conditions that situate today’s GAI squarely within the intellectual domain and reach of the various fields of the humanities. The article suggests that this research potential remains unfulfilled, as most of the work on GAI production is quantitative or computational and done outside the humanities, in the computer sciences, tech industry, or experimental social sciences. It is proposed that the study of GAI may gain from filling this lacuna, as the epistemologies and methodological tools of the humanities differ from and are complementary to these main trends of GAI research today. Finally, some typological observations on existing contributions are offered, showing how GAI lies at the heart of, and serves to accentuate, the contrast between deep-seated opposing positions across humanistic disciplines.