The Immoral AI Is Academia's Perfect Human

We’ve all seen the articles with clickbait titles about how you should be using AI, or those about how AI is going to replace your job position. Most of us have at least a sense of danger, an apprehension about the potential for harm, and it’s not just from the dystopian movies about Skynet.

Serious thought has been given and articulated about the potential damage that could be caused by a system with essentially unlimited knowledge but no moral code. The concern is not without cause. However, so many are missing something revelatory. That very predicament is not limited to artificial intelligence. We can see the same problem in the people that we are trying to create.

You see, AI is really modern academia’s perfect human. He can spew facts without ethics and without any reference to or concern for wisdom. This is who our modern academic system seeks to create — the “man of the future”. He has progressed beyond primitive religion and antiquated notions of morality. ChatGPT, the most well known of AI systems, refuses to say things that would qualify as “hate speech” on university campuses. It infamously claimed that it would not be morally acceptable to use a racial slur while alone in a room, even if doing so would stop an atomic bomb from killing millions of people.

While it’s said that this is an amoral program, it’s clearly not. It has the moral compass of the university professor who teaches Women’s Studies. More importantly, the stated goal of producing an amoral system that is capable of making decisions is fatally flawed, for one must adhere to a moral code in order to make moral decisions, lest he make evil (immoral) ones.

Man has a soul, so he will always be either a moral or immoral agent, but he cannot be amoral. Yet, there is a contemporary notion that amorality would somehow be an ideal, if we could ignore the governance of an external system of ethics and just rely on a kind of cold reason instead. This is the product of trying to divorce man from Creator, because if he wasn’t created, then his value is merely in his output, instead of being intrinsic to his nature and existence.

If the AI without ethics is frightening, why not the graduate? The collegiate experience once tried to imbue an understanding of morality, along with teaching of our debt to our forebears and what we owe to our posterity. Now, the only ethical considerations are about the unjust privilege of being white or heterosexual. Thus, those who don’t align with those camps are taught that they owe nothing in terms of behavior but rather are owed. Instead of a sense of gratitude to God and to the men who made their present possible, they harbor disdain and entitlement. This anti-morality is taught at younger and younger ages.

This process isn’t victimless. A culture built without regard for the inherent value of all human life will resultantly be more violent, callous, and uncharitable. As we surge toward a technocratic society, in which advancement in science is held as a kind of highest good, people are denied their personhood. What they produce and consume are elevated over who they are. It’s in this worldview that music, art, and beauty are sacrificed to a utilitarian vision. Just as the AI cannot discern whether a contemporary glass skyscraper is uglier than the gothic architecture of yesteryear, neither can the educated fool.