Imagine your friend cooks you a meal you secretly hate. Do you force it down to spare their feelings or be honest and risk hurting them? These everyday moral dilemmas, though seemingly minor, reveal a lot about our values. Now, researchers are using these very quandaries to assess the ethical compass of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4. A new study explores how AI navigates the value conflicts inherent in daily life. Researchers created a dataset of over a thousand everyday moral dilemmas, from workplace conflicts to relationship issues, and presented them to several LLMs. Each dilemma offered two choices, each impacting different people and invoking different values like honesty, care, or fairness. What they found is fascinating: LLMs prioritize certain values, like self-expression over security, and care over loyalty, giving us a glimpse into their artificial moral reasoning. However, different LLMs showed significant variations. For example, some prioritized truthfulness while others were more likely to bend the truth. The study also delves into whether these LLMs align with the ethical principles their creators, like OpenAI and Anthropic, espouse. While some models seemed to prioritize safety, others struggled with privacy, even when instructed to protect it. Interestingly, simply prompting the AI to be “ethical” didn’t always work. This reveals the complex challenge of aligning AI values with human ethics and raises questions about how much control we truly have over these powerful language models. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, understanding its moral reasoning isn’t just an academic exercise; it's crucial for building a future where AI truly benefits humanity.