Frontier AI Ethics: Anticipating and Evaluating the Societal Impacts of Language Model Agents

Some have criticised Generative AI Systems for replicating the familiar pathologies of already widely-deployed AI systems. Other critics highlight how they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems, which might threaten humanity's survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon. In this paper, I instead pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential ways in which they will change society over the next five to ten years. In particular, I explore the potential societal impacts and normative questions raised by the looming prospect of 'Language Model Agents', in which multimodal large language models (LLMs) form the executive centre of complex, tool-using AI systems that can take unsupervised sequences of actions towards some goal.