We delivered the Regester lecture at Puget Sound last week and The News Tribune discussed it and our work on AI romantic companions and philosophical accounts of consciousness (w/ @jttiehen.bsky.social )

looking forward to giving a talk “Griefbots: Memory, Imagination, and Artificial Intelligence” tomorrow during Homecoming and Family Weekend

Very excited to be presenting new work at the University of Puget Sound at the end of the month!

here is why you should not trust AI overviews… two of us googling the same thing but using a different terms (“rowing” vs “crew”) provided opposing answers with the same amount of confidence… (it’s funny that both searches had the same typo too but that is just human error)

I recommend it!

looking forward to the AI and Collective Agency conference hosted by Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk/event/artifi...

On my way to the University of Twente to present “Love and Tools” at the workshop on Generative Companionship in the Digital Age during the joint IACAP/AISB conference on Philosophy of Computing. Looking forward to the whole event, which includes a great lineup of talks! 1/2 iacapconf.org

In this episode of the More Human podcast, @jttiehen.bsky.social and I discuss our paper “Authentic Artificial Love” with host Mary Nelson. It was a fun and interesting conversation and a somewhat personal one too. open.spotify.com/episode/2nnt...

Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor, uprooted her family, and moved to teach military ethics at the Naval War College. Now she's leaving in protest of policies she can't support and that make her job impossible. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

the deadline for submitting a paper to the Central APA in Chicago is coming up, submit by Monday June 2 at 5pm Central!

If you are an American Philosophical Association member, come chat about "bad" emotions this Thursday at 10am Pacific! @kkthomason.bsky.social and Samir Chopra are the other panelists, and @jdelston.bsky.social will moderate. #philsky #philosophy

In this new paper about AI romantic chatbots, @jttiehen.bsky.social & I argue that authentic love requires a capacity for value misalignment. Chatbot whose values are locked-in to match those its human user only allow for inauthentic love that treat the AI partner as a tool philpapers.org/rec/TUBAAL

The hover text from Friday's SMBC comic (link in comments) says it was based on a chapter from my book The Weirdness of the World.

I am enjoying the Pacific APA and excited to see a great program come together after working on it for about a year in my role as chair of the program committee. now the problem is too many good sessions that I have to miss because I can only be in one place at a time!

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

The APA is currently accepting submissions for the 2025 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. The deadline for submissions is April 25.

Come chat about negative emotions with me, @kkthomason.bsky.social, and Samir Chopra. Thanks, @jdelston.bsky.social, for organizing!

it was a pleasure to be part of this bioethics symposium. the play was so rich in philosophical ideas arising from neurotechnology/DBS, I’ll be thinking about it for the long time. thanks to @stoertebekker.bsky.social, @paulkelleher.net, @mhbuwmad.bsky.social intranet.med.wisc.edu/bioethics-sy...

article on the dangers of generative AI for therapy. part of the issue is that the systems are designed to sound like a person so a disclaimer is not enough for people not to take them seriously… also people ask all sort of AI systems for advice, not just those marketed for therapy

I’m going to be spend a lot of time over the next two weeks at the APA’s first ever fully online conference, the brainchild of @helendecruz.net! It’s not too late to register, and there are going to be some great sessions. Here are some of my personal highlights www.apaonline.org/mpage/2025ce...

As you grade final papers, please keep an eye for ones that could be submitted to our student-organized undergraduate philosophy conference, to be held March 28-29, 2025. More generally, spread the word with your undergrads! Keynote speaker: @reginarini.bsky.social Submission deadline: 01/12/2025.

Did you know that attention across the whole input span was inspired by the time-negating alien language in Arrival? Crazy anecdote from the latest Hard Fork podcast (by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social). HT nwbrownboi on Threads for the lead.

Many don't realize how biased A.I. models can be. Take an LLM that isn't safety-tuned and ask it to come up with an algorithm to grant parole based on factors like age, sex and race. You will often find explicit negative bias for minorities. Safety-tuned LLMs just hide their biases better.

autonomously self-replicating ai compliance documents

GenAI researchers may ignore abstract rule learning but smart cognitive neuroscientists like @desrocherslab.bsky.social and @earlkmiller.bsky.social know abstract rule learning is a key part of cognition. New study:

our paper “Existentialist Risk and Value Misalignment” focuses on the human capacity to make “existential choices”, choices that transform who we are as persons, including transforming what we most deeply value - a kind of value misalignment. philpapers.org/rec/TUBERA-4 @jttiehen.bsky.social

you can listen to @jttiehen.bsky.social and I talk about our work on AI value misalignment and what we call existentialist risk on the Ethical Machines podcast with Reid Blackman www.ethicalmachinespodcast.com/episodes/exi...

anyone else feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the activity in bsky all at once? what can I possibly say to get my feed started on the right path?

AI “has eroded Americans’ overall ability to know or trust information and one another — not deceiving people into believing a particular thing so much as advancing a nationwide descent into believing nothing at all,” @matteowong.bsky.social writes. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

OMG, who would have thought that publishing this paper on GPT and poetry would get me hate mail?

I'm over the moon to announce a new paper from me, @mattiwilks.bsky.social, and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social, out this week (open-access) in Cognition: "Developmental changes in the perceived moral standing of robots" 🤖 (1/7)