Ever since GPT-3 and its relatives in AI exploded onto the scene, there’s been one question on our minds: How will these technologies affect our intelligence? Put another way, what will be left of us as human beings after we’ve offloaded all of our skills and tasks onto the many neatly programmed AI technologies that are already changing the shape our society? In this blog, Sam Finnegan-Dehn will find it out for us.

OpenAI published the newest multimodal version of their large language model GPT-4 on March 14th 2023, and the AI-world exploded. In this article, I offer you three things: First, we’ll look into how different actors have reacted to the recent developments and what does that tell about risks and opportunities. Second, I’ll take you on a journey to ethics and inspect how two perspectives – human flourishing and freedom – could help us understand the impacts of generative AI on humans. Lastly, I'll leave you with an action plan for harnessing benefits of generative AI — ethically.

Discussion around AI ethics has rapidly evolved in the past few years: Companies, organisations, and governments are drafting principles for ethical, responsible AI. Operationalisation models are being developed to bring principles into practice. Is that all ethics has to offer – mere principles?