AI Influence

Physical and Psychological Harms

"These harms include harms to physical integrity, mental health and well-being. When interacting with vulnerable users, AI assistants may reinforce users’ distorted beliefs or exacerbate their emotional distress. AI assistants may even convince users to harm themselves, for example by convincing users to engage in actions such as adopting unhealthy dietary or exercise habits or taking their own lives. At the societal level, assistants that target users with content promoting hate speech, discriminatory beliefs or violent ideologies, may reinforce extremist views or provide users with guidance on how to carry out violent actions. In turn, this may encourage users to engage in violence or hate crimes. Physical harms resulting from interaction with AI assistants could also be the result of assistants’ outputting plausible yet factually incorrect information such as false or misleading information about vaccinations. Were AI assistants to spread anti-vaccine propaganda, for example, the result could be lower public confidence in vaccines, lower vaccination rates, increased susceptibility to preventable diseases and potential outbreaks of infectious diseases."

Privacy Harms

"These harms relate to violations of an individual’s or group’s moral or legal right to privacy. Such harms may be exacerbated by assistants that influence users to disclose personal information or private information that pertains to others. Resultant harms might include identity theft, or stigmatisation and discrimination based on individual or group characteristics. This could have a detrimental impact, particularly on marginalised communities. Furthermore, in principle, state-owned AI assistants could employ manipulation or deception to extract private information for surveillance purposes."

Economic Harms

"These harms pertain to an individual’s or group’s economic standing. At the individual level, such harms include adverse impacts on an individual’s income, job quality or employment status. At the group level, such harms include deepening inequalities between groups or frustrating a group’s access to resources. Advanced AI assistants could cause economic harm by controlling, limiting or eliminating an individual’s or society’s ability to access financial resources, money or financial decision-making, thereby influencing an individual’s ability to accumulate wealth.

Sociocultural and Political Harms

"These harms interfere with the peaceful organisation of social life, including in the cultural and political spheres. AI assistants may cause or contribute to friction in human relationships either directly, through convincing a user to end certain valuable relationships, or indirectly due to a loss of interpersonal trust due to an increased dependency on assistants. At the societal level, the spread of misinformation by AI assistants could lead to erasure of collective cultural knowledge. In the political domain, more advanced AI assistants could potentially manipulate voters by prompting them to adopt certain political beliefs using targeted propaganda, including via the use of deep fakes. These effects might then have a wider impact on democratic norms and processes. Furthermore, if AI assistants are only available to some people and not others, this could concentrate the capacity to influence, thus exerting undue influence over political discourse and diminishing diversity of political thought. Finally, by tailoring content to user preferences and biases, AI assistants may inadvertently contribute to the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles, and in turn to political polarisation and extremism. In an experimental setting, LLMs have been shown to successfully sway individuals on policy matters like assault weapon restrictions, green energy or paid parental leave schemes. Indeed, their ability to persuade matches that of humans in many respects."

Self-Actualisation Harms

"These harms hinder a person’s ability to pursue a personally fulfilling life. At the individual level, an AI assistant may, through manipulation, cause users to lose control over their future life trajectory. Over time, subtle behavioural shifts can accumulate, leading to significant changes in an individual’s life that may be viewed as problematic. AI systems often seek to understand user preferences to enhance service delivery. However, when continuous optimisation is employed in these systems, it can become challenging to discern whether the system is genuinely learning from user preferences or is steering users towards specific behaviours to optimise its objectives, such as user engagement or click-through rates. Were individuals to rely heavily on AI assistants for decision-making, there is a risk they would relinquish personal agency and entrust important life choices to algorithmic systems, especially if assistants are ‘expert sycophants’ or produce content that sounds convincing and authoritative but is untrustworthy. This may not only contribute to users’ reduced sense of self-trust and personal empowerment; it could also undermine self-determination and hinder the exploration of individual aspirations. At the societal level, were AI assistants to heavily influence public opinion, shape social discourse or mediate democratic processes, they could diminish communities’ collective agency, decision-making power and collective self-determination. This erosion of collective self-determination could hinder the pursuit of societal goals and impede the development of a thriving and participatory democracy