In a filing with the IRS, OpenAI Inc., OpenAI’s nonprofit org, disclosed that it awarded a grant to Duke University researchers for a project ti

OpenAI is funding research into ‘AI morality’

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2024-11-22 23:00:14

In a filing with the IRS, OpenAI Inc., OpenAI’s nonprofit org, disclosed that it awarded a grant to Duke University researchers for a project titled “Research AI Morality.” Contacted for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to a press release indicating the award is part of a larger, three-year, $1 million grant to Duke professors studying “making moral AI.”

Little is public about this “morality” research OpenAI is funding, other than the fact that the grant ends in 2025. The study’s principal investigator, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a practical ethics professor at Duke, told TechCrunch via email that he “will not be able to talk” about the work.

Sinnott-Armstrong and the project’s co-investigator, Jana Borg, have produced several studies — and a book — about AI’s potential to serve as a “moral GPS” to help humans make better judgements. As part of larger teams, they’ve created a “morally-aligned” algorithm to help decide who receives kidney donations, and studied in which scenarios people would prefer that AI make moral decisions.

According to the press release, the goal of the OpenAI-funded work is to train algorithms to “predict human moral judgements” in scenarios involving conflicts “among morally relevant features in medicine, law, and business.”

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