SBS AI Series | Q&A with Trevor Hedberg: Ethics and AI

Artificial intelligence is changing rapidly, but understanding its impact requires looking beyond the technology itself. Across the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, our faculty are examining AI through the lenses of ethics, language, culture, human behavior, policy and society — and asking fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. As part of our exploration of AI and its many facets, this series features in-depth conversations with SBS scholars whose expertise brings distinct perspectives to this rapidly evolving field. These conversations go beyond the headlines to explore the questions, possibilities and consequences of AI — and what they can tell us about ourselves and the world we are building.

In this second of three Q&As, Trevor Hedberg, associate professor of practice affiliated with the W.A. Franke Honors College and the Department of Philosophy, explores the questions AI raises about responsibility, fairness and how the technology should be used. Hedberg teaches Ethics of AI and incorporates AI-related units into courses including Ethical Leadership and Advanced Environmental Ethics. He will also work with the University Center for Assessment, Teaching and Technology (UCATT) in fall 2026 to develop an online version of Ethics of AI for the AI and Society minor. In this in-depth conversation, Hedberg considers who stands to benefit from AI, the responsibilities of individual users, the moral challenges of autonomous weapons and the role philosophy can play in shaping how we think about AI.

You teach courses on the ethics of AI. What’s one ethical question you wish more people were asking about AI?

I wish more people were asking who the new technology will benefit and how that will occur. Tech companies are plunging headfirst into this technology as if it is a foregone conclusion that AI will ultimately be a good thing for society, but in many domains, that conclusion is far from obvious: Will the workers who have their jobs replaced or who must take on new administrative roles monitoring an AI system be better off as a result? Are artists better off now that their work and its style can so easily be mimicked in AI-generated content? Are our students better off with the constant temptation to rely on chatbots for quick answers to their inquiries rather than trying to develop their own critical thinking skills? 

No doubt there are benefits to the use of AI in certain industries and contexts, but in others, this technology threatens to do more harm than good. I think we need to do a more careful weighing of the costs and benefits associated with deploying this technology to assess where its use really does make things better and what human activities should be continued without AI integration.

Is there an AI-related ethical dilemma that consistently challenges or surprises your students?

Students have been consistently divided about the use of autonomous weapons in war. I suspect the moral dimensions of war have been on their minds more than usual due the recent international conflicts in Ukraine and Iran. Some of my students end up thinking that wars fought with unmanned drones or (in the future perhaps) robots would be better because they would have far fewer human casualties. Others think the lack of human casualties might remove deterrents to going to war or make moral responsibility for killing in war too murky to hold people accountable for their wrongdoing. 

There are, of course, many other arguments to consider as well, and more nuanced stances are possible. In one of my in-class debates last spring, one of the groups creatively argued that the use of unmanned drones or other autonomous weapons could be permissibly used in cases where a nation is defending itself from an attacker but could not be permissibly used by a nation that was committing an act of aggression (e.g., attacking, invading) against another nation. 
 

"All told, I think students are consistently surprised by how complex the moral terrain of this issue turns out to be."

As AI becomes part of everyday life, what responsibilities do individual users have — not just the companies developing these tools?

Users shouldn’t use AI to assist them in doing things that are clearly wrong, such as getting Chat GPT’s advice on how to commit tax fraud or build a bomb. Additionally, since existing AI tools make it very easy to generate content – text, images, videos, and so on – and present it as if it is one’s original creation, everyone should disclose their use of AI when they produce work that others will view or read. In my view, presenting AI content as if it reflects your own thoughts or ideas can also wrong when there is no written or visual output, such as if one is reading chatbot responses to questions asked in an online job interview or using AI to maintain a conversation with a person someone is looking to date. Such behavior is inauthentic and dishonest in ways that I would consider morally objectionable.

In organizational or institutional contexts, if AI use is prohibited by a reasonable policy – such as if a professor explicitly prohibits use of AI on an assignment because its use could hinder a learning outcome – then users should generally adhere to that policy. Right now, however, established guidelines are often either controversial or absent, and that can make it hard for users to determine whether a particular use of AI is permissible or not. For now, at least in some contexts, we may have to accept that users may reasonably disagree about what uses of AI are acceptable and let them make their own decisions about how to use the technology.

What role should philosophy play in shaping conversations about AI?

There are so, so many philosophical questions about AI that have implications for how the technology should be used. Many of these questions are about the nature of AI and the implications of its moral status for our behavior. Could an AI system have the same moral status as a person, for instance? Does that vary depending on the extent to which that AI has humanlike intelligence? Does it make sense to regard any AI system as a friend? Can an AI system be wronged by anything we do to it? Could it be held morally responsible for things that it does to others or the ways its programming causes harm? If the AI system cannot be held morally responsible for these things, then who should be held responsible?

There are also practical questions about the implementation and maintenance of AI systems. Should we be constructing so many data centers given their high water consumption and energy usage, particularly in an era of accelerating climate change? If AI automates a significant portion of jobs, how should society adapt to accommodate the reduced need for human labor? To what extent should AI development be regulated? If self-driving vehicles are safer than human-driven vehicles, should we disincentivize personal car ownership through increases in taxes or insurance costs on non-autonomous vehicles? And of course, the list could go on.

While experts in computer science, economics, and public policy can certainly contribute to answering these questions, they are primarily in the domain of philosophy. They are value-based questions that are not straightforwardly answered merely by an understanding of the empirical facts. 

Thus, my hope is that the analytical reasoning that underscores a lot of contemporary moral philosophy will be a cornerstone of how we think through these issues as the 21st century progresses.

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