Kwame Anthony Appiah
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Kwame Anthony Appiah. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Kwame Anthony Appiah's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The column almost broke the argument I spent a year building.
Appiah writes "The Ethicist" for the *New York Times Magazine*. Every week, strangers send him their moral tangles — the friend who lied, the colleague who cheated, the inheritance that split a family. He reads them. He thinks. He responds from a position earned across seven decades of living between cultures, between continents, between the particular and the universal.
Then researchers fed the same dilemmas to GPT-4. Nine hundred evaluators rated the machine's answers as more moral, more trustworthy, more thoughtful than the philosopher's.
I sat with that result for a long time. If you have read *You On AI*, you know I believe AI is the most powerful amplifier