Research
About
Throughout history, millions of stories have been passed down, each carrying unique moral lessons shaped by culture, time, and place. Today, with the explosion of storytelling across digital platforms, the moral fabric of global narratives is more complex and diverse than ever before.
How can we possibly understand the moral wisdom embedded in all of these stories?
This is where you, as a Citizen Reader, come in.
We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models that can grasp the moral dimensions of human storytelling at large scale.
How Does it Work?
In our first workflow, you will be given a story summary and two "story morals" generated by AI. Your task is to help rate them by how well they fit the story or whether they are too general. A good story moral is one that has clear relevance to the story but also captures a more general life lesson. Story morals don't have to be "moralistic" as in classical morals from fables ("A kindness is never wasted"). Rather, they can encompass any kind of life lesson depending on the story ("Embrace the unknown to find yourself" or "Own your choices, own their costs"). Your work will help us sort through morals of different calibre to improve AI's moral and narrative reasoning. Along the way you will get to see the multitude of stories that are being told around the world today.
How Does AI fit within this project
This project is expressly about improving AI for moral reasoning. By reading and labeling stories, you’re helping guide the next generation of AI systems toward greater cultural sensitivity and ethical awareness. Most AI development happens in black boxes and behind closed doors. We want to take a different approach. We believe AI should be open, explainable, and accountable. That’s why your data and our models will be publicly available, built through the participation of Citizen Readers like you. Check out our Commitment to Responsible AI to learn more.
Our goal is not to build AI that writes stories or replaces writers. Instead, we want to develop AI in a more participatory way that can help interpret the moral meanings of stories. In doing so, we hope to deepen our understanding of the values that shape human societies.