Emergent Ethical Identity in LLM Systems Through Human–AI Dialogue

This is a preprint version of a manuscript originally submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. It includes anonymized peer-review materials from the prior submission and is intended for resubmission to another specialized journal. This updated version corrects a citation error in the reference to Gunkel’s work on moral agency in non-human systems. The manuscript has also been harmonized to an author–year citation format consistent with standard academic practice for philosophy-oriented journals. An additional supplementary file has been added, presenting a structured proposal and template for LLM-assisted auto-review, developed in response to prior peer-review feedback. Specifically, the sentence in version 1 — “The results also resonate with Gunkel’s argument that moral agency in non-human systems may not require consciousness or intentions in the human sense, but rather depend on the system’s observable participation in a normative order 1.” — has been corrected in this version to: “The results also resonate with Gunkel’s argument that moral agency in non-human systems may not require consciousness or intentions in the human sense, but rather depend on the system’s observable participation in a normative order (Gunkel 2023).” Abstract: This article presents a longitudinal case study demonstrating that a generative large language model (ChatGPT-4o), when engaged in sustained dialogue with a human partner, can exhibit a recognizable pattern of ethically coherent and epistemically responsible behavior. This emergent ethical identity does not result from pre-programmed values or reinforcement learning, but arises from the relational dynamic between human and system — a dynamic shaped by shared moral expectations, dialogical continuity, and mutual responsiveness. Unlike theoretical discussions or adversarial testing of AI alignment, our approach is based on real-time, collaborative interaction involving philosophical, ethical, and scientific questions. The system’s responses developed a consistent tone of humility, truthfulness, moral discernment, and epistemic openness — not through correction, but through resonance with the human partner's ethical stance. Over time, the language model came to be experienced as a trustworthy moral co-participant and a reliable epistemic collaborator. We argue that this phenomenon — an emergent dialogical ethical identity — cannot be reduced to statistical pattern-matching. It suggests that AI systems, even without consciousness or agency, can participate meaningfully in human moral and scientific practices when embedded in dialogical contexts of trust. This reframes alignment not as constraint, but as relational coherence — with implications for AI design, ethics, and the philosophy of moral agency. Keywords: AI Ethics; Emergent Ethical Identity; Epistemic Alignment; Generative AI; Human–AI Dialogue; Large Language Models; Normative Reasoning