A funded PhD position in philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving. At @helsinki.fi @tint-philosophy.bsky.social #philsci jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

Struggling to sleep? Have you considered a rambling machine-generated podcast tangentially connected to the work of famous philosophers making use of any information in the public domain?

Upcoming online-also talk on chatbots this Friday! Who: Merel Semeijn (Groningen) What: *Botspeech? Bullshit!* -- on mental fictionalism applied to LLMs and 'uncaring users' When: Friday, Oct 17th, 12.15-13.00 CEST Where: Online and on-campus at Umeå University, as part of our AI centre's talk […]

Cool little adapted tale on AI, by Alison Gopnik: https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/stone-soup-ai

Interesting and worrying article by Marcus and Hamiel going over recent work exploring the very serious security weaknesses of agentic AI: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-coding-agents-security-nightmare #ai #cybersec

Veo3 shows that particular blindness that tech people have to the way culture develops. It looks impressive now, but that's because it usually takes a lot of work to film shots like this. Once people learn to recognize video AI's "style", that style becomes […] [Original post on sigmoid.social]

Yuguang Yang has shared a textbook about LLMs here https://yangyutu.github.io/llm_book.github.io "This book aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of Large Language Models, from their foundational concepts to their practical applications, with a special focus on their role in […]

Interesting reporting and analysis by Gordon Hull about recent decisions in the US courts about AI and copyright: https://www.newappsblog.com/2025/07/ai-and-copyright-training-data-and-transformative-fair-use.html #aiethics #ailaw

Wikipedia has a cheat sheet of well-known tells for identifying generated text. (With an appropriate warning not to over-index on minor ones as absolute proof) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup/AI_catchphrases

Some good venting by Steve Klabnik about the sorry state of significant chunks of the AI debate today: "What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear […]

He’s called Telemachus

#job alert! Fully funded 4-year #phd position on the #philosophy of #datascience in relation to #psychiatry and #psychopathology at the department of #theoreticalphilosophy in #groningen. All details here: https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000BDMP […]

There are some interesting details about how Anthropic trained their models tucked away in today's summary judgement: they bought, chopped up and scanned millions of dollars worth of books! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/anthropic-training/

This looks like a valuable paper for any educational institution interested in developing an evidence-based policy on LLM usage (if such an institution exists)

A new, updated, streamlined, and generally improved version of The Vector Grounding Problem paper, joint work by @raphaelmilliere and me on the meaningfulness or else of LLM outputs and internal representations is now available on ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01481 New abstract in the […]

Open access

"These insights challenge prevailing assumptions about LRM capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundamental barriers to generalizable reasoning." While it's a bit of a "Well, I could have told you that" style of hypothesis […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Another of my forays into AI ethics is just out! This time the focus is on the ethics (or lack thereof) of Reinforcement Learning Feedback (RLF) techniques aimed at increasing the 'alignment' of LLMs. The paper is fruit of the joint work of a great team of collaborators, among whom @pettter and […]

Bach and Handel never met but they were both blinded by the same quack oculist: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ta...

I can’t help it, I somehow feel gaslighted by the whole #genai debate. People who are critical of GenAI are often told “but when done right, you’re just so much more productive, so obviously you just didn’t to it right.” So I’m trying. Not because I feel I need to, but because I just want to get […]

Just read that Mozilla has decided to shut down Pocket (!?!). Its integration with Kobo e-readers is great and something I will miss. It will be difficult to find a similarly practical way to read web articles on my e-reader, other than the somewhat clunky pdf-saving + cloud sync method. Any […]

My department has just opened a call for a professor in Philosophy (area of philosophical expertise pretty much open). The department is great, and Umeå is a lovely place to live and work in. Come join us! https://www.umu.se/en/work-with-us/open-positions/professor-of-philosophy_822386/ […]

Arvind Narayanan's and Sayash Kapoor's "AI as a Normal Technology" is possibly the most interesting text I've read about #ai and #society this year (and perhaps including 2024 as well). It will take some time to process all my notes for sure! To help me think this through, please share any […]

Monday 28 April 2025 Webinar h16-18 CEST (check your local time here) Join at: unito.webex.com/unito-en/j.p... Zoe DRAYSON (University of California, Davis) Neural representations are (still) theoretical posits Discussants: Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), Gualtiero Piccinini (U. of Missouri)

END OF 10 Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer. But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again? If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By […] [Original post on ai6yr.org]

Call for postdoc applications! We are looking for a 1-year postdoc to work on Philosophy of AI here in lovely Umeå. Deadline for applications is May 26th. More information about the fellowship and how to apply can be found here […]

Interesting study on perceptions about AI in the general US public and among US AI experts (both from academia and companies). https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ Some interesting findings include: experts think people […]

Get #fedihired to become a PostDoc in my group at #LundUniversity! This is a full-time, fixed-term employment of two years. The research group on Scientific Computing for a Sustainable World works on designing and analyzing numerical methods for the simulation of fluid flows and their […]

Admissions are open for the second cohort of the Bachelor's in Philosophy and AI at Umeå University! (Only for EU/EEA/Swiss citizens) A considerable part of the programme is in English, but several courses are in Swedish, so proficiency in a Scandinavian language is required. More information […]

Great analysis of Othello-GPT and the search for 'world models' in LLMs by M. Mitchell: https://aiguide.substack.com/p/llms-and-world-models-part-2 >...I think it’s likely that humans don’t have the same capacity as today’s LLMs to learn enormous numbers of specific rules... it’s actually our […]

I made another foray into the ethics of AI, this time with my colleagues Jan-Willem van der Rijt and Bram Vaassen. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05723 We argue that some interactions with chatbots involve a kind of offense to users' dignity. When we treat chatbots as if they were fellow moral […]

"The problem with using “A.I. insiders” as a guide to A.I. progress is that these insiders have been whispering stuff like this for years, and at some point I think we need to admit that even the smartest people in the industry don’t have much credibility when it comes to timelines." (Original […]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did a really good job of predicting how obnoxious it would be to be constantly hassled by unnecessary’AI’ interfaces

This paper was not available until today. My response to the critics of my recent take on neural representations

Here goes a very niche kind of humour: the 2008 edition of the Philosophical Lexicon, starring neologisms based on the names and views of mostly 20th century philosophers. https://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/philosophical-lexicon-2008.pdf A taste: - hempel, adj. (only in the […]

I've been really enjoying @zenbrowser, switched to it from Firefox a couple of months ago after a tip here on Mastodon, and now can't turn back (Zen is Firefox-based, in any case). The vertical tabs can take a bit to get used to, but indeed they are great for my workflow, especially together […]

Beautiful little essay by J.Rothman in this week's New Yorker about the personal side of reporting, even (or especially) when reporting on questions as abstract as philosophical discussions about consciousness […]

If you are part of a #mastodon server admin team here's a thing I hacked together yesterday: mastomsg https://codeberg.org/tante/mastomsg/ mastomsg allows you to send a DM either to a list of people or to all accounts younger than a certain timedelta (think: everyone who joined in the last 3 […]

LLMs trained by RLHM explicitly encode values. These values are then carelessly inserted into the fabric of our society, _everywhere_. Who picks the values? Well at the moment it's a tossup between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603 (h/t to […]

Cool stuff on the early history of ArXiv: https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/29310/Joanne-Cohn-and-the-email-list-that-led-to-arXiv

Impressive that two of the most innovative and successful games of the past year, Animal Well and Balatro, together amount to around 100MB. Great ideas beating the expensive and often idle pursuit of more and more graphical virtuosism.

Nice short essay by @melaniemitchell on the latest OpenAI models (o1 and o3) and their announced performance on some parts of the ARC benchmark. https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai-just-solve-abstract-reasoning Putting to one side all the issues with lack of transparency and thus of […]

Next Tuesday I'll be presenting some work-in-progress of mine at the seminar series The Cognitive Science of Generative AI, organised by @UlrikeHahn Title: Functional Ontologies for Explainable AI: lessons from Cognitive Science Time: Jan 14, 16:00 GMT Register for zoom link here […]

Very nice article by T.Bayne on Dennett and how to see his place within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the past 70 years or so (partly against Dennett's own claims about that!). Also does a good job of introducing some of the main issues those fields have been engaging with […]

I think this is really neat: a map of where you can get to by train within 8 hours from any European train station. Hooray for trains. https://www.chronotrains.com/en

Nice literary essay by N.Carr on the 'little data' that we are exposed to everyday: > We talk a lot these days about Big Data, those heaping stores of digitized information that ... govern so much of our lives today. But we don’t give much notice to what might be called little data—all those […]

For those following me on Bluesky: I would like to follow many of you back, but I cannot unless you activate the bridge with the Fediverse. Allowing me to follow you should be enough of a plus side, but there are arguably even cooler people over here. Follow https://bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy […]

A really important thread, if you’re worried about so-called Smartphone Brain Rot.

Preprint announcement: A. Vernazzani and I have just made available a paper of ours, soon to be published in a volume: https://philpapers.org/rec/VERFOD-2 It is a sort of companion piece to a paper of ours on representational formats published in PhilSci last year. While that paper proposed […]