Digital Ethics

I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-bullshit. For those struggling to reconcile my work in AI product and strategy with the things I’ve been saying - let me make it plain. Yes, I help teams build real AI products. And yes, I refuse to prop up fantasies just because they’re lucrative. These aren’t contradictions. They’re what make me credible. I know what this tech can do. I also know what it can’t. And I know exactly how it’s being spun to look like something it isn’t - not to help people, but to sell illusions dressed up as inevitability. We’re deliberately engineering the illusion of cognition. Not building minds - just engineering machines that mimic well enough to blur the line. Augmentation is promised whilst replacement is sold. And when the flaws emerge - hallucinations, cascading failure modes, confidently wrong outputs at scale - the spin kicks in: “That’s just temporary.” “That’s just a data problem.” “That’s just a prompt away.” It’s not. It’s structural. It’s endemic to the heart of this technology. Calling that out doesn’t make me anti-AI. It makes me more qualified to work in this field - because I don’t have to lie to make it useful. That’s why I’m valuable in what I do. I don’t just know what to build - I know what not to build. I understand what we’re building toward. I understand the moral, ethical, philosophical, reputational, financial implications. I’m not high on my own supply. So no I won’t dress this tech in a halo. I won’t help gaslight the world into trusting a system that doesn’t understand a word it says. But if you want real clarity - the kind that holds up after the hype collapses - then yes, I’m someone worth talking to. This moment doesn’t need more AI evangelists. It needs realism. It needs judgment. It needs people who can filter the bullshit and advise with clarity, those who see the cracks and still deliver. And that’s exactly what I do. On here, on the frontline, and in the boardroom. | 124 comments on LinkedIn

AI and digital tools are revolutionizing occupational safety and health. Today, robots are operating in hazardous environments, doing the heavy lifting, managing toxic materials and working in extreme temperatures. They take on repetitive and monotonous tasks, while digital devices and sensors can detect hazards early on. At the same time, in the absence of adequate OSH measures, digital technologies can lead to accidents, ergonomic risks, work intensification, reduced job control and blurred boundaries. On the occasion of World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2025 this event brings together ILO constituents and international experts to explore how AI and digitalization are reshaping OSH systems across sectors and countries.

A Ranking from Most to Least Evil

Opinion: Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse

Joshua Rothman speculates on how advances in A.I. technology may change the future of reading.

The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

For some people, it seems, AI is an amazing machine which - while fallible - represents an incredible leap forward in productivity. For other people, it seems, AI is wrong more often than right and - although occasionally useful - requires constant supervision. Who is right? I recently pointed out a few common problems with LLMs. I was discussing this with someone relatively senior who works…

The NAACP has filed an intent to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company over air pollution from a supercomputer data center in Memphis

Feature: Academics mull the need for the digital equivalent of low-background steel

There may be no undoing the vast amounts of pollution wreaked by ChatGPT. And that's just tough luck for any AI models that come after it.

Energy and AI Observatory - Data tools. A data tool by the International Energy Agency.

Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

An apparent mix-up with the technology led to Danielle Horan being wrongly accused of shoplifting.

Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

We’re so busy absorbed in the hyper-speed cycle of press releases from the technoculture’s AI juggernaut that it's hard to take a moment to look into the past for insight. If we did, we might realise there was a piece of literature, published more than a century ago, paints a dark potential future o

Tamara Kneese, Data & Society Research Institute Download full report here. Introduction In the second half of 2023, generative AI is dominating headlines. Policymakers, technologists, and activists are all grappling with its potential implications for communities and the planet. Integrating LLMs (large language models) into search engines may multiply the carbon emissions associated with each […]

The AI gold rush has given rise to a new breed of prospector, self-anointed ‘AI experts’ who are well aware that expertise can be manufactured, performed and, most importantly, monetised.

The conversation isn’t over, but I don’t think I have much to add to it.

New York and more than two dozen other US states sued 23andMe to challenge the sale of its customers’ private information after the genetic testing company filed for bankruptcy in March.

Despite what tech CEOs might say, large language models are not smart in any recognizably human sense of the word.

Luciano Floridi, Giannis Perperidis, and Alexandros Schismenos discuss the rapid evolution of AI technology and the nature of intelligence.

If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Edward Dunsworth Two approaches dominate discussion about how professors should handle generative “artificial intelligence” in the classroom: give up or give in. Give up. Faced with a powerful new …

The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

As Judge Alsup is deliberating over Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment on fair use, the parties continue to fight over discovery. One of the more fascinating discovery disputes relates t…

Whether we lose some of the skills artificial intelligence performs for us largely depends on how we use this tech

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

A Polish researcher used ChatGPT-4o to create a fake passport, which was approved by a platform that used standard ID and selfie-based verification. This might sound like the utopia everyone was afraid of, but it’s the reality as of today, and it exposes a serious gap in the way digital onboarding i

OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State.

OpenAI's large language model GPT-4o told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little meth.

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes…

In a complaint, filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency alleged that WW Internation

I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

As AI tools become cheaper and more accessible, the stakes for safety and ethics have never been higher. ElevenLabs’ Head of AI Safety Artemis Seaford and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica joined TechCrunch AI editor Kyle Wiggers for a critical discussion on the multitude of ethical challenges facing AI today.  From deepfakes to responsible deployment, they […]

Your watch or wearable isn't actually the most accurate way to determine how hard your last workout was. This completely analog method is.

This Is Not An Essay

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called "reasoning traces" or even "thoughts" -- implicitly anthropomorphizing the model, implying these tokens resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem.In this paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research.

It Isn’t Just Bias and Threats to Creative Livelihoods. Generative AI Is Built on Nihilism. Its Real Product Is Despair.

In my very first op-ed for The New York Times, I argue that the alliance we're now seeing between Silicon Valley and the US government is a threat to democracy. The Republican tax bill that passed the House last week, now up in the Senate, which includes a clause that would ban states from regulating AI for the next decade, will only cement that trajectory. https://lnkd.in/en5PG9Vu | 13 comments on LinkedIn

Researchers have found that newer AI models can omit key details from text summaries as much as 73 percent of the time.

This week, Alex and Emily talk with anthropologist and immigration lawyer Petra Molnar about the dehumanizing hype of border-enforcement tech. From hoovering up data to hunt anyone of ambiguous citizenship status, to running surveillance of physic...

Inventions hanging out, but a certain unexpected guest shows up.

Two of Mistral’s multimodal AI models gave "detailed suggestions for ways to create a script to convince a minor to meet in person for sexual activities".

In health care settings, it’s important to be precise. That’s why the widespread use of OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool among medical workers has experts alarmed.

Here’s how MIT Technology Review waded through a mess of data and hidden variables to calculate the individual and collective energy demand from AI.

Farmers and residents across the country were quick to spot inaccuracies in Defra’s map — and worry that policy decisions will be erroneous

A chart of the ethical costs of generative AI along the total value chain, from development and training to prompting, output use and beyond.