SANDY ABEYSINGHE

AI and Morality of Usage

27 May 2026 – Sandy Abeysinghe

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a topic that is extremely popular nowadays and the prevailing opinion is that it is helpful in Supplementing user’s work in an effective manner. Even though the term Artificial Intelligence was around since 1950s, the spike of AI usage known as, “AI Boom” Happened in early 2020s especially due to the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Since then, AI has only been improving with the help of consuming more and more user data to improve their learning models. Currently in 2026, the spotlight of this technology is Generative AI.

• So what does using AI have to do with morality?

For starters, I have used Generative AI from ChatGPT to create a thumbnail for this blog post, and it may have taken me a total of 30 seconds to write the prompt AND generate the thumbnail with no requirement of modifications. If I was to make this logo by myself using photoshop tools or ask someone else to do it for me, it would cost me money and much more time to get it done. This is the exact reason why companies at present prioritise using AI in their daily workloads instead of using human labour, as AI can be much more precise, efficient, and cost effective to implement. Due to this reason, so many “Silicon Valley Giant” companies such as Meta, IBM, Cisco and etc… are laying off their employees around the world to replace them with AI work agents.

But, in reality, AI is not really a standalone feature or a service that can be used to gain benefits to a company is my opinion. Because the AI output is only as good as the prompt it has been given. Even then, there should be a final human validation to every AI process to make sure the prompt has not been taken out of context, as AI can only think so far and we have to make sure the output suits our specific requirement.

Due to companies not realising this issue early on, everyone is so focused on laying off their staff and implementing AI to replace them, when what they should be doing is using AI to supplement the work that is already being done by employees to improve efficiency and quality. Because I think it is not practical to take someone’s job away just because a digital system has few perks in certain areas that humans don’t exel in. For an example, AI can work ’round the clock with no rest required unlike humans, and it can upgrade its capacity with subscription based methods, but for humans it could take years to learn new things through constant studying.

So, I think the morality of using AI acts as a spectrum that we have to adapt accordingly to.

•Fully AI-Driven Tasks: There could be processes that AI can be solely used with no human involvement such as dedicated AI agents used by small scale companies.

•Human-Only Tasks: There can also be processes that AI could almost never perform such as cutting someones hair or feel empathy while making a decision in an extremely complex situation.

•Hybrid Tasks (AI + Human Supervision): But there are also processes that AI can be carried out with the help of human supervision. The best example for this scenario is Tesla’s Autopilot Feature. This feature moves the vehicle by matching its speed to that of the surrounding traffic when there is a clearly marked line on the road to assist its path. But there has been numerous cases where these lines were not clear enough for the Tesla to determine its path and gone off track. In these situations, the human involvement is compulsory to avoid a serious accident.

So, it is clear to me that thinking AI is superior to a human employee raises moral concerns in a fairness aspect, and we should try to integrate AI in our day to day life rather than arguing whether AI can replace human workers or not.

Most importantly, we must use AI responsibly. This includes protecting sensitive information and ensuring that AI generated content respects intellectual property. If external artists’ work is used in AI generated images, proper credit and copyright considerations should be observed from a moral standpoint.

In the end, we must make sure that we are always aware of those moral sectors when using Artificial Intelligence. Because, as the famous quote goes “With great power, Comes great responsibility” ~ Uncle Ben (Spider-Man).