Digital Ethics

We argue that the high energy use by present-day semiconductor computing technology will prevent the emergence of an artificial intelligence system that could reasonably be described as a “superintelligence”. This hard limit on artificial superintelli

Shocking new paper with potentially serious implications

Patronus AI on Wednesday released research showcasing how often leading AI models produce copyrighted content.

Eight years after a controversy over Black people being mislabeled as gorillas by image analysis software — and despite big advances in computer vision — tech giants still fear repeating the mistake.

The next generation of AI comes with a familiar bias problem.

AI’s social benefits are unproven but its harms are clear. We must kick out the bad politics and mould a better future, says Dan McQuillan.

In which I become an old man yelling futilely at the clouds

We are a non-profit creating more realistic and inclusive images of artificial intelligence. Visit our growing repository available for anyone to use for free under CC licences, or just to use as inspiration for more helpful and diverse representations of AI.

Watermarks are too easy to remove to offer any protection again disinformation

I wrote an essay about the tensions of "AI" and democracy because I don't believe their respective values and goals fully match.

Every year millions of electrical and electronic devices are discarded as products break or become obsolete and are thrown away. These discarded devices are considered e-waste and can become a threat to the environment and to human health if they are not treated, disposed of, and recycled appropriately. Common items in e-waste streams include computers, […]

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.

Conversations between Wikipedia editors following CNET's AI scandal reflect the reputational hazards of AI content and dubious ownership.

New data centers are springing up every week. Can the Earth sustain them?

Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot appears to get tripped up by a specific prompt that sends it down a dark, unhinged rabbit hole.

Gemini's woke A.I., Taylor Lorenz x Chaya Raichik, and the death of scenes

How does ChatGPT generate images? When does it search the internet? We dug into the backend to figure how how ChatGPT works.

A Chilean environmental court partially reversed a permit allowing Google to build a data center in the country on Tuesday, asking the U.S. company to revise its application to take into account the effects of climate change.

An online video game marketplace says it has referred user accounts to legal authorities after a Bellingcat investigation found nonconsensual pornographic deepfake tokens were being surreptitiously sold on the site.

A handful of member countries are pushing to outlaw chemicals used to produce microchips.

No future for the forever chemicals?

On other minds and why we should stop humanising tech

Generative AI is not built to honestly mirror reality, no matter what its creators say.

Microsoft, Google and Meta are using more water to cool down data centres that power artificial intelligence products

People may learn from and replicate the skewed perspective of an artificial intelligence algorithm, and they carry this bias beyond their interactions with the AI

It acknowledged ‘inaccuracies’ in historical prompts.

After a diversity initiative proved disastrous, it’s time to loosen chatbot guardrails

Avast collected data on location, health concerns, and more.

You may have heard that “data is the new oil”—in other words, data is the critical raw material that drives innovation in tech and business, and like oil, it must be collected at a massive scale an