The Moral Dilemmas of AI with Michael Inzlicht
Decoding the Gurus
Intro
Chris and Matthew introduce Michael Inzlicht and set up the episode's focus on AI, empathy, effort, and moralization studies.
Mickey is BACK with two new papers he has co-authored, a bunch of opinions, and a very unwelcome idea: maybe the problem with AI isn't that it doesn't work but that it works too well!
The first paper, Against Frictionless AI, argues that AI assistance and its ability to take away the effort from thinking, writing, and smooth out social(like) interactions could be robbing those activities of the very thing that makes them worthwhile.
The second paper is a more empirical investigation that presents a bunch of studies examining the topic of the (alleged) moralisation of AI. Some findings suggest that opposition to AI among some people isn't really about risks or trade-offs but rather about non-negotiable sacred moral values. Who knew?
We also discuss effort justification, reproducible research, robosexual allyship, and just how much humanity remains within the cyborg Matthew Browne.
And remember... It's just like our opinion, man!
Links
- Decoding Academia 34: Empathetic AIs? (Patreon Series)
- Ovsyannikova, D., Oldemburgo de Mello, V., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans. Communications Psychology, 3, Article 4.
- Zohar, E., Bloom, P., & Inzlicht, M. (2026). Against frictionless AI. Communications Psychology, 4, Article 39.
- Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Côté, É., Ayad, R., Inbar, Y., Plaks, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2026). The moralization of artificial intelligence (Manuscript under review).
- Paul Bloom's Small Potatoes Substack
- - My friend thinks it's a good idea for us to spend most of our time with AI companions
- - Is it irresponsible for academics to refuse to use AI?
- Mickey's Speak Now Regret Later Substack
- - AI Alarmism Trades on Fear, Not Facts
- Mickey's provocative tweet on his recent paper
- DTG Previous Interview with Mickey on the Replication Crisis, Mindfulness, and Responsible Heterodoxy
- Andy Masley Substack debunking the AI water usage claims
- Andy Masley Substack: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet
- Pataranutaporn, P., Karny, S., Archiwaranguprok, C., Albrecht, C., Liu, A. R., & Maes, P. (2025). “My Boyfriend is AI”: A computational analysis of human–AI companionship in Reddit’s AI community. arXiv.
- Critical response to Mickey's paper from Roy Schulam on Substack
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