"Large Language Models" New pre-print of a chapter from the in-process book "Understanding AI: A Critical Intro for the Humanities and Social Sciences" @politybooks.bsky.social Available from @ssrn.bsky.social ssrn.com/abstract=540... Comments and feedback very much welcomed.

Guardian report on recent development in "AI Welfare". Notice the article does not mention the controversy around the proposal that machines are entitled to care. Where is the debate? What happens if care practices are overextended? #AgainstAIWelfare #AIWelfare www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Chatbot given power to close ‘distressing’ chats to protect its ‘welfare’

Anthropic found that Claude Opus 4 was averse to harmful tasks, such as providing sexual content involving minors

theguardian.com

Lots of discussion of this story yesterday but what really hit me in the solar plexus was the chat transcripts where he desperately pleads ‘I hope you are real’ and ‘please be real’. It assures him “she” is and gives him a (fake) NYC address to visit. He wasn’t Meta’s customer. He was their prey.

A flirty Meta AI bot invited a retiree to meet. He never made it home.

Impaired by a stroke, a man fell for a Meta chatbot originally created with Kendall Jenner. His death spotlights Meta’s AI rules, which let bots tell falsehoods.

reuters.com

Philosopher, cognitive scientist, and pioneering AI scholar Margaret Boden has died today. Nature has an open access obituary: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Margaret Boden obituary: cognitive scientist who explored how machines might emulate human imagination

Pioneering artificial-intelligence scholar, whose influential work bridged cognitive science, philosophy and computer science.

nature.com

I'm excited to share a pre-print excerpt from my forthcoming book, "Origins and Future of Self-Knowledge"! I’m proud to release a preview that includes the Preface and the final chapter, “Mindshaping a Self-Knowing Machine: Can a Robot Know Itself?” 📄 Read it here: zenodo.org/records/1663...

Our article is finally published! "Against AI welfare: Care practices should prioritize living beings over AI" 🎉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Thank you so much to my incredible co-authors1 #AIethics #ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfAI #AIWelfare #EnvironmentalEthics

Against AI welfare: Care practices should prioritize living beings over AI

In this Comment, we critique the growing “AI welfare” movement and propose a novel guideline, the Precarity Guideline, to determine care entitlement. In contrast to approaches that emphasize potentia...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com