Title: Data-Driven Understanding of Real-Life Moral Dilemmas
Speaker: Josh Nguyen (The Australian National University)
When: Thursday, 20 April 2023, 11am - noon
Where: ANU Building 145, Room 1.33 and zoom
https://anu.zoom.us/j/9874074503?pwd=bzlETnF1VEUzcyswZDBMTktQRUYyZz09
Abstract
The emergence of AI systems—trained on massive datasets and seemingly
capable of engaging in moral discourse—raises several important
questions about automated moral decision making. While the philosophical
literature largely focuses on idealized moral dilemmas, we aim to
examine the patterns of human moral judgment and sentiment observable in
large-scale social media datasets, which can provide insight into
real-world ethical issues. In this MPhil completion talk, we will
present two such studies. First, we explore the features of everyday
moral conflicts through a topic-driven analysis of over 100,000 moral
discussion threads on Reddit. Our results suggest that many complex
moral dilemmas arise from nominally neutral topics such as money, work
and appearance. Moreover, these topics serve as an important covariate
in examining the ways in which a moral story is framed and how a
judgment is made. In the second study, we operationalize the moral
foundations theory—which proposes five fundamental dimensions of
morality—in analyzing content on Reddit and Twitter. Consistent with
prior research, we find that the relative importance of these moral
dimensions can explain the variance in people's stance on several
socially relevant topics like atheism and the legalization of abortion.
We also find that opposing judgments in the same moral conflict can be
characterized by the moral dimensions they underscore. Together, these
studies demonstrate the utility of a data-driven approach to practical
ethics, especially given the rising presence of AI-assisted solutions.
Bio
Josh Nguyen is an MPhil student at the Computational Media Lab,
supervised by Lexing Xie (School of Computing) and Colin Klein (School
of Philosophy). He is also affiliated with the Humanising Machine
Intelligence Grand Challenge at ANU. His broad interests include
computational social science, machine learning and optimization. He
received his BSc in computer science from the University of Melbourne in
2020.
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Tom Worthington http://www.tomw.net.au
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