The AI oracle of Delphi uses the problems of Reddit to offer dubious moral advice

Got a moral quandary you don’t know how to solve? Fancy making it worse? Why not turn to the wisdom of artificial intelligence, aka Ask Delphi: an intriguing research project from the Allen Institute for AI that offers answers to ethical dilemmas while demonstrating in wonderfully clear terms why we shouldn’t trust software with questions of morality.

Ask Delphi was launched on October 14th, along with a research paper describing how it was made. From a user’s point of view, though, the system is beguilingly simple to use. Just head to the website, outline pretty much any situation you can think of, and Delphi will come up with a moral judgement. “It’s bad,” or “it’s acceptable,” or “it’s good,” and so on.

Since Ask Delphi launched, its nuggets of wisdom have gone viral in news stories and on social media. This is certainly as its creators intended: each answer is provided with a quick link to “share this on Twitter,” an innovation unavailable to the ancient Greeks.

It’s not hard to see why the program has become popular. We already have a tendency to frame AI systems in mystical terms — as unknowable entities that tap into higher forms of knowledge — and the presentation of Ask Delphi as a literal oracle encourages such an interpretation. From a more mechanical perspective, the system also offers all the addictive certainty of a Magic 8-Ball. You can pose any question you like and be sure to receive an answer, wrapped in the authority of the algorithm rather than the soothsayer.

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