Intuitive judgements towards artificial intelligence verdicts of moral transgressions

Automated decision-making systems have become increasingly prevalent in morally salient domains of services, introducing ethically significant consequences. In three pre-registered studies (N = 804), we experimentally investigated whether people's judgements of AI decisions are impacted by a belief alignment with the underlying politically salient context of AI deployment over and above any general attitudes towards AI people might hold. Participants read conservative- or liberal-framed vignettes of AI-detected statistical anomalies as a proxy for potential human prejudice in the contexts of LGBTQ+ rights and environmental protection, and responded to willingness to act on the AI verdicts, trust in AI, and perception of procedural fairness and distributive fairness of AI. Our results reveal that people's willingness to act, and judgements of trust and fairness seem to be constructed as a function of general attitudes of positivity towards AI, the moral intuitive context of AI deployment, pre-existing politico-moral beliefs, and a compatibility between the latter two. The implication is that judgements towards AI are shaped by both the belief alignment effect and general AI attitudes, suggesting a level of malleability and context dependency that challenges the potential role of AI serving as an effective mediator in morally complex situations.