When AI Helps Too Well: Transformative Inquiry and the Risk of Second-Order Drift in Ethics Research
AI tools lend themselves to ethics research because they may help improve its speed or rigour. But the better they become at assisting ethical inquiry, the greater the risk that ethics research drifts towards the kinds of reasoning AI assists best. This paper argues that the impact of large language model (LLM) assistance on ethics research may be structurally asymmetric. LLM use may be especially