Personal Artificial Intelligence Assistants (PAIAs) are coming to your smartphone. Will they always tell the truth?

Given the future scenario where humans increasingly seek subjective feedback from AIs, we can expect that their influence will accelerate. Will the widespread use of PAIAs influence social norms and expectations around praise, encouragement, emotional support, beauty, and creativity? And how will these personal AI systems resolve the delicate balance between truthfulness and providing emotional support to their user?

More, much more interaction

Personalized AI is on the brink of being as pervasive [1] as smartphones have become.

A Pew Research Center survey [2] done in February 2024 finds that “22% of Americans say they interact with artificial intelligence almost constantly or several times a day. Another 27% say they interact with AI about once a day or several times a week.” Together, these represent almost half of U.S. adults. While this number is impressive, the researchers further note that “only 30% of U.S. adults correctly identify the presence of AI across six examples in a recent survey about AI awareness.”

Personal Artificial Intelligence Assistants (PAIAs) will be increasingly deployed as the performance of AI systems continues to improve. Millions of people are already using versions of these PAIAs as virtual assistants for work [3], coding [4], companionship[5], and romance[6][7].

Aligning truthful AI: What truth?

In a future where AI systems interact with humans, the question isn’t just about capability and safety but also about morality: should an AI ever lie?

We know that AI systems can be purposefully deceptive [8]. AIs can deceive humans while playing cooperative [9] and competitive [10] strategy games, playing poker [11], and performing simulated negotiations [12].

Clearly, AI systems should never, ever lie or hide the truth; correct?

The risks of deceptive AI are significant and multifaceted. A misaligned AI that used strategic deception [13] to achieve its goals could be difficult to detect. It could potentially hide [14] this capability, recognize [15] the training environment, and take a treacherous turn [16] post-deployment. Deceptive AI is an ongoing concern, generating research and mitigation [17] efforts.

This said, an A...

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