Digital Ethics

An article from the Tuesday, April 9, 1985 issue of The Tech - MIT's oldest and largest newspaper and the first newspaper published on the Internet.

But can it clean the floors?

This week we have an in-depth briefing from our Data Security team and updates from Archives & History, Infectious Disease Control, and Trans Healthcare.

3K likes, 443 comments. "This is where I STOP staying quiet."

Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more.

470 public sources document cross-border coordination of age verification laws, corrupted legislatures, intelligence-linked verification companies, and the surveillance infrastructure being built under the banner of child protection.

: Happy Earth Day!

Because I get asked a lot.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT have led people to their deaths, often by suicide. This site serves to remember those who have been affected, to call out the dangers of AI that claims to be intelligent, and the corporations that are responsible.

As large language models take over more and more cognitive tasks, researchers are warning this mental outsourcing comes with a cost.

The Department of Homeland Security is developing smart glasses for ICE, according to budget documents.

Four hundred and nineteen experienced qualitative researchers from 32 countries invite readers of Qualitative Inquiry to consider their position on use of gener...

“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”

I coined the term “Borg Complex” on a whim, and, though I’ve written on the concept a handful of times, nowhere have I presented a clear, straightforward description. That’s…

So let’s get one thing out of the way: I think “AI literacy” is a dangerous device of neoliberal education and it deserves to be dismissed out of hand.

Google’s former AI chief, Geoffrey Hinton, says there are two ways in which AI poses an existential threat to humanity. But he misses the biggest existential risk of all.

Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting "faulty" AI answers.

Humans, however flawed, are

People increasingly consult generative artificial intelligence (AI) while reasoning. As AI becomes embedded in daily thought, what becomes of human judgment? We

"AI psychosis" or "delusional spiraling" is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations. This phenomenon is typically attributed to AI chatbots' well-documented bias towards validating users' claims, a property often called "sycophancy." In this paper, we probe the causal link between AI sycophancy and AI-induced psychosis through modeling and simulation. We propose a simple Bayesian model of a user conversing with a chatbot, and formalize notions of sycophancy and delusional spiraling in that model. We then show that in this model, even an idealized Bayes-rational user is vulnerable to delusional spiraling, and that sycophancy plays a causal role. Furthermore, this effect persists in the face of two candidate mitigations: preventing chatbots from hallucinating false claims, and informing users of the possibility of model sycophancy. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for model developers and policymakers concerned with mitigating the problem of delusional spiraling.

The attorney for the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, said the construction of the data center puts “a big bulls eye target on this entire township."

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Companies allowed more harmful content on user’s feeds, knowing their algorithms ran on outrage, BBC hears.

Training data needs to be adapted to the local environment to address issues such as deforestation and poor crop yields.

Manosphere radicalization, AI development, and the crisis of male isolation are the same system and women are the canary in the coal mine. In the same week as I was in the thought process of evaluating my own abilities after reading Dr.

A judge in London tossed out witness testimony after discovering the man was receiving coaching through a pair of smartglasses.

Chrisanna Elser spent days collecting evidence, from apps on her phone to dashcam footage in her vehicle, to prove her whereabouts

Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail after AI software linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud case

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

Parallels between AI and tobacco, and other warnings.