LLMs Are Powerful Tools, Not Moral Agents
Why AI Can’t Be a Moral Judge: It’s Just a Tool, Not a Person Let’s talk about AI tools like the ones that write stories or solve math problems. They’re super helpful, but can they really tell right from wrong? Spoiler: No way! Let’s break it down. What’s an LLM? Think of a Large Language Model (LLM) as a super-smart pattern matcher. It’s been trained on millions of books, websites, and articles. When someone asks a question, it doesn’t “think” like a human—it just looks for patterns in the data it’s seen. For example, if you ask, “What’s 2+2?”, it answers “4” because that’s the most common response in its training. But if you ask, “Is it okay to cheat on a test?”, it might say “No, cheating is bad!”—not because it cares about honesty, but because that’s what people usually say in the data. Why AI Isn’t a Moral Agent A moral agent understands right and wrong and makes choices based on that. Humans are moral agents—we feel guilt, empathy, and know consequences. AI? Not even close. Here’...
