The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants

Understand

This paper focuses on the opportunities and the ethical and societal risks posed by advanced AI assistants.

• We define advanced AI assistants as artificial agents with natural language interfaces, whose function is to plan and execute sequences of actions on behalf of a user, across one or more domains, in line with the user's expectations.
• The paper starts by considering the technology itself, providing an overview of AI assistants, their technical foundations and potential range of applications.
• It then explores questions around AI value alignment, well-being, safety and malicious uses.