EVENT
The Wharton Ethicist Experiment
The 2023 Wharton School study — led by Christian Terwiesch — that found evaluators could not distinguish GPT-4's ethical advice from Kwame Anthony Appiah's own, and the subsequent UNC/Allen Institute study in which the machine was rated more moral, trustworthy, and thoughtful.
In 2023, a Wharton School research team led by Christian Terwiesch took moral dilemmas of the kind Appiah addresses weekly in his New York Times Magazine 'The Ethicist' column and presented them to GPT-4. They then showed both sets of responses — Appiah's and the machine's — to hundreds of evaluators without identifying the source. The evaluators found no significant difference in quality. A subsequent study by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill and the Allen Institute for AI found that GPT-4o's ethical advice was rated by nine hundred evaluators as 'more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful and correct' than Appiah's own. The experiments became the empirical provocation that drove Segal's foreword and Appiah's implicit response across the book — not because they proved the machine was wiser but because they exposed the distinction between the product of ethical reasoning and the position from which ethical reasoning is done.
