Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Artificial intelligence draws an unusual kind of opposition. People resist it even after they are shown it works, and they resist it across wildly different uses, from generating art to giving medical advice. Pragmatic worry cannot explain that pattern. I argue that a meaningful slice of AI opposition is moral: a conviction that using AI is wrong, full stop, not merely impractical. In four studies, my collaborators and I find that AI is moralized in news headlines at levels rivaling vaccines and GMOs; that most people who oppose AI say their view would not budge even if the benefits grew and the risks shrank; that this opposition behaves like a single general attitude rather than a set of application-specific judgments; and that earlier moralization predicts refusing a useful AI tool months later, at real personal cost. Moralization makes a person ignore evidence, forgo benefits, and treat an empirical question as a settled verdict. If we want to evaluate AI honestly, we first must notice when we have stopped evaluating it at all.
About the Speaker
Michael Inzlicht is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment as Professor in the Department of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. He is also a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. His research sits at the boundaries of social psychology and cognitive science, exploring the paradoxes of human motivation—particularly why people both avoid and find meaning in mental effort, and how digital technologies are reshaping behavior and wellbeing. He has pioneered research showing that empathy is cognitively demanding and often avoided because of its mental costs, challenging common assumptions about human compassion. His current work examines how exerting effort paradoxically increases feelings of meaning, how rapid content switching on digital platforms increases boredom, whether artificial intelligence can express empathy more effectively than humans, and the psychological effects of recreational cannabis use.
Artificial intelligence draws an unusual kind of opposition. People resist it even after they are shown it works, and they resist it across wildly different uses, from generating art to giving medical advice. Pragmatic worry cannot explain that pattern. I argue that a meaningful slice of AI opposition is moral: a conviction that using AI is wrong, full stop, not merely impractical. In four studies, my collaborators and I find that AI is moralized in news headlines at levels rivaling vaccines and GMOs; that most people who oppose AI say their view would not budge even if the benefits grew and the risks shrank; that this opposition behaves like a single general attitude rather than a set of application-specific judgments; and that earlier moralization predicts refusing a useful AI tool months later, at real personal cost. Moralization makes a person ignore evidence, forgo benefits, and treat an empirical question as a settled verdict. If we want to evaluate AI honestly, we first must notice when we have stopped evaluating it at all.
About the Speaker
Michael Inzlicht is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment as Professor in the Department of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. He is also a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society. His research sits at the boundaries of social psychology and cognitive science, exploring the paradoxes of human motivation—particularly why people both avoid and find meaning in mental effort, and how digital technologies are reshaping behavior and wellbeing. He has pioneered research showing that empathy is cognitively demanding and often avoided because of its mental costs, challenging common assumptions about human compassion. His current work examines how exerting effort paradoxically increases feelings of meaning, how rapid content switching on digital platforms increases boredom, whether artificial intelligence can express empathy more effectively than humans, and the psychological effects of recreational cannabis use.
