The Ethical Landscape of Generative AI: A Multi-Level Analysis of ChatGPT

Abstract

The advent of generative artificial intelligence, particularly large language models like ChatGPT, represents a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction, offering transformative potential across numerous sectors. However, this rapid advancement has precipitated complex and urgent ethical debates, which often remain fragmented and disproportionately focused on risks, lacking a systematic analysis that equally considers ethical opportunities and holistic governance. This paper aims to address this gap by conducting a systematic, multi-dimensional ethical analysis of ChatGPT from a technology ethics perspective. It constructs a comprehensive analytical framework, examining ethical implications at the micro for individual, meso for organizational, and macro for societal and global levels. Our analysis systematically maps both the significant ethical benefits, such as enhanced accessibility, educational empowerment, and economic optimization, and the critical challenges, including issues of authorship attribution, misinformation, labor market disruption, political manipulation, environmental costs, and opacity of the underlying models. The study concludes that the ethical landscape of ChatGPT is inherently socio-technical, requiring coordinated, multi-stakeholder governance. It provides structured insights and practical recommendations for developers, policymakers, and educators to navigate these challenges, thereby contributing to the responsible development and deployment of generative AI technologies.