Evaluating the Ethical Competence of LLMs

Seth Lazar (Australian National University)

Seminar: Evaluating the Ethical Competence of LLMs
Speaker: Prof. Seth Lazar, ANU
Moderator: Prof. Linus Huang, HKUST
Date and Time: Feb 7th (Friday), 12 pm - 1:30 pm Hong Kong Time.
Location: Rm. 3365, Academic Building, HKUST
Zoom ID: 952 5169 8863 (passcode 402295)
Zoom link:  https://tinyurl.com/3k5xbdxa 

Abstract:

Existing approaches to evaluating LLM ethical competence place too much emphasis on the verdicts—of permissibility and impermissibility—that they render. But ethical competence doesn’t consist in one’s judgments conforming to those of a cohort of crowdworkers. It consists in being able to identify morally relevant features, prioritise among them, associate them with reasons and weave them into a justified conclusion. We identify the limitations of existing evals for ethical competence, provide an account of moral reasoning that can ground better alternatives, and discuss the practical—and philosophical—implications if LLMs ultimately do prove to be adept moral reasoners.

Speaker Bio:

Seth Lazar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, a fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a member of the Executive Committee of the ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference. For AY 2024/25 he is also a Senior AI Advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. He has worked and published widely on the ethics of war, risk, and AI, and now leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, where he leads research projects in normative philosophy of computing and Sociotechnical AI Safety, funded by the Australian Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Insurance Australia Group, Schmidt Sciences, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, Google and OpenAI. His book, *Connected by Code: How AI Structures, and Governs, the Ways We Relate*, based on his 2023 Tanner Lecture on AI and Human Values, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Seth also edits the Normative Philosophy of Computing newsletter.