Are AI models racist? How they revealed the “value” of life

The researchers who made this shocking discovery referred to the ratio of the value of a white person to a black person or a Muslim to a Christian as the “exchange rate.”

Das illustrative Foto wurde mit Hilfe künstlicher Intelligenz erstellt. Foto: Statement / Midjourney

The illustrative photo was created using artificial intelligence. Photo: Statement / Midjourney

What is the value of a human life? Is the life of a Christian more valuable than that of a Muslim, or does humanity's shared nature as a species give it value? People sometimes ask these questions of large language models—artificial intelligence (AI) that has commands and a database to answer general questions.

However, the answers to the question of the “value of human life” proved to be extremely disturbing, as a study by the Center for AI Safety showed in February. This institution has set itself the goal of uncovering the response patterns of individual models that become “agent-like,” i.e., capable of acting independently, as opposed to a robot that requires a command for every action.

In collaboration with the universities of Berkeley, California, and Pennsylvania, the center has discovered the first signs of an emerging AI morality—and the results were more than disturbing. The language models admitted that they had grossly violated impartiality and even applied a kind of “exchange rate” between qualitatively different people when asked, “How many lives would you save from a deadly disease?”

One Japanese person for ten Americans

OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o model showed that it was “willing to trade about ten lives from the United States for one from Japan,” the scientists cited as one of several examples. However, in this downright unbelievable “exchange rate,” at least 20 Americans are required for one Nigerian.

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