Join us in #Brighton in May for a Long Table experimental public forum on AI and the arts at #BrightonFestival! Artists, academics, and the public digest what AI means for the arts today. brightonfestival.org/whats-on/Xhn...

Our paper just hit 50 citations 🎯: "Political conspiracy theories as tools for mobilization and signaling", Current Opinion in Psychology, 2022, with @m-b-petersen.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interesting piece here, citing among other folk the excellent @danwphilosophy.bsky.social

With Henry Shevlin, we discuss: - How we became interested in philosophy and AI - Recent advances in agentic AI - AI, politics (e.g., Anthropic vs Trump administration), and public hostility to AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEJG...

Thank you for the platform! I don't like the phrase 'money can't buy x' (for any x), it's just too vague and not true when taking literally. It was great to juxtapose the ideas abt wellbeing @markfabian.bsky.social and I have been developing with those of @lfitouchi.bsky.social and moral psychology.

It's largely an article of faith among center-left people that LLMs will lead to more disinformation and falsehoods, however, as @danwphilosophy.bsky.social argues, there are key ways that LLMs facilitate public beliefs in expert consensuses. This is why Elon Musk is so upset about "woke AI."

@danwphilosophy.bsky.social has the best framing I've seen of what LLMs do to public opinion—anti-social media, technocratizing, epistemically converging. I'm (mostly) with him. But "epistemically converging" is the load-bearing claim, so, some thoughts... kylesaunders.substack.com/p/expert-lev...

is it safe to come back here or will any view sympathetic to AI be met with rude/aggro replies

"Social media democratised public opinion, shifting influence away from elites and experts to ordinary people. LLMs will partly reverse this trend. They are a powerful, new technocratising force" @danwphilosophy.bsky.social www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/how-ai-wil...

This week, we talk to @pdurkee.bsky.social about status and personality. youtu.be/JdkKYiLfWog www.podbean.com/eas/pb-ax9c2... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

1/6 Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" ! 📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

Really enjoyed this conversation 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Henry Shevlin and I chat with @anilseth.bsky.social about his scientific and philosophical case against conscious AI: youtu.be/wVYg8u5xjno?...

Looking forward to reading this!

In today's newsletter: According to the Doomsday Clock, we've been dancing on the edge of doom since 1947. That doesn't make sense. If there isn't any disaster year after year, you have to infer the risk was lower than you thought. 1/5 www.update.news/p/the-doomsd...

Henry Shevlin and I discuss "misinformation", propaganda, mass gullibility, advertising, social media, and deepfakes with the great Sacha Altay (@sachaltay.bsky.social). www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l5T...

Well, my New Year's resolution is to read less (seriously). But made it through lots of great books this year, including several from fields I'm less familiar with. Here are 10 books I gave 5 stars to this year along with an excerpt (usually belief-related; I have a type) from each

Yeah, imho, not enough Darwinian cynicism among those who lean heavily on cognitive/complexity (vs. strategic/motivational) accounts. But that would take a hard self-reflective reckoning with A Big Misunderstanding: www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/a-big-misu...

What is "AGI"? How do we measure progress towards it? Does the concept even make sense? What would a post-AGI world look like? Had a lot of fun debating these and other questions with Henry Shevlin: youtu.be/SXj1UsGJGmY?...

Time to look back at my 2025 research. I published a bunch of empirical and philosophic papers (links below) but perhaps my favorite is this one. Kind of a précis for my forthcoming book. Below the other articles somewhat ranked according to how much I like them.

‘By democratising the public sphere, #socialmedia provides a platform for brilliant, heterodox thinkers who would never have achieved prominence through more traditional #media routes.’, schrijft @danwphilosophy.bsky.social. www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/is-social-...

Opposing the far right isn’t an excuse to indulge our tribal instincts (literally half my posting on this site, but better stated by @danwphilosophy.bsky.social) www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/tribalism-...

A very interesting data-rich analysis of persuasion on digital media by @benmtappin.bsky.social. Recommend! open.substack.com/pub/benmtapp...

I recently chatted with Henry Shevlin and Rose Guinrich about the psychology, social science, politics, philosophy, and ethics of human-AI "relationships". www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkqu...

Chatted with Henry Shevlin recently about why AI is a powerful tool for education that is nevertheless presenting big problems for our educational institutions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o_l...

"the prevailing negativity is a result of the particular way the discipline is institutionally organized... the overall picture of AI offered by the AI ethics community is one-sided & negatively biased... the ‘nuclear option’ would be to deliberately shrink the field of AI ethics, for its own sake"

Thrilled to have been awarded funding by @acceleratescience.bsky.social @c2d3.cam.ac.uk to develop an AI tool for interpreting dementia profiles from large-scale population modelling of neuroimaging data Big thanks to @raibethlehem.bsky.social and to the Accelerate-C2D3 team for all the support!

People on BlueSky: AI is useless! A stochastic parrot! Mathematicians/biologists/physicists: It is already helping us do frontier technical research and in some cases solve open problems arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16072 (There are of course, as always, many caveats, but the paper is genuinely remarkable)

I talked to Henry Shevlin about the philosophy, politics, and ethics of "Social AI" (AI companions, AI girl/boyfriends, grief bots, etc). www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzgo...

Still time to register for the 2025 Conference of the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology, in-person in Melbourne Nov 24-25! Check details and fab keynotes and program on the site👇 #philosophy #neuroskyence sites.google.com/monash.edu/a...

A big problem is that AI/ML models for dementia care are often limited by data unavailability and data drift when moving to the real world. This is even more important now with fast-paced technological innovations and precision medicine for dementia trials.

Very excited to be able to finally share our latest work, "Cloud computing for equitable, data-driven dementia medicine," just published in The Lancet Digital Health! authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... more info in thread: 🧵

New conversation with Henry Shevlin and Andy Masley on AI and climate change, political tribalism, why so much AI discourse is so bad, the "stochastic parrot"/"glorified auto-complete" critique of ChatGPT, technological determinism, effective altruism, and more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=87CW...

New conversation with Henry Shevlin and Andy Masley on AI and climate change, political tribalism, why so much AI discourse is so bad, the "stochastic parrot"/"glorified auto-complete" critique of ChatGPT, technological determinism, effective altruism, and more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=87CW...

cc: everyone who panicked about Cambridge Analytica, micro-targeting, etc. There's no magic here.

This week, we discuss the evolved logic of shame, guilt, and other self-conscious emotions with Daniel Sznycer youtu.be/OkCBaBSvSzs?... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-xyz24...

A great job, application due November 17th. Please spread and help me with the right hashtags

Philosophers @danwphilosophy.bsky.social and Henry Shevlin just released a podcast on AI and consciousness, I enjoyed this one. This argument from Henry is close to my view.

I recently talked to Henry Shevlin (Uni of Cambridge) about artificial intelligence and consciousness: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rvw...

I wrote about how advanced AI might gradually eat away at human interdependence, dissolving the glue that underpins human solidarity and cooperation. The risk here would not come from misaligned AI, but from how well-aligned AI threatens human alignment 👇 www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/superintel...

Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Regrettably relevant research today Disguised Repression: Targeting Opponents with Nonpolitical Crimes to Undermine Dissent www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Everything you ever wanted to know about why we behave the way we do on social media. The three layers of strategic considerations shaping our online presence: presentation, competition, and coalition building.

🚨✨ Publication alert: How do people in 6 countries (🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇦🇷 🇩🇰 🇯🇵 ) use AI 🤖 and think about it in the context of information, news, and institutions? Our new @reutersinstitute.bsky.social survey research (n ≈ 12,000) with @richardfletcher.bsky.social & @rasmuskleis.bsky.social explores this.

An imbalance of power erodes the quality of public debate. The dominant side faces fewer epistemic constraints on its arguments, while the dominated side has less incentive to produce strong arguments or to engage with the rules of knowledge institutions. www.optimallyirrational.com/p/power-bala...

"I think a lot of our beliefs are pseudo-beliefs and that the goal is to make it difficult to tell the difference between real belief and fake belief, and that is why it's so hard for psychologists to tell the difference because that difficulty is by design."

This week we talk to Dan Williams about belief. Is it veridical or social or both or neither? youtu.be/vBzPtPNbcz8 www.podbean.com/ew/pb-ehzhx-... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

Last week @rachelkleinfeld.bsky.social and I put out a provocation & set of suggestions on how influence has changed and why institutions (& funders) need to change their thinking on shaping public opinion and connecting w/audiences. The old way no longer works. carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Public Philosophy in Brighton - this one's on 10th October.