Digital Ethics

Alphabet's Google was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems.

Last weekend, the White House challenged thousands of hackers to try to outsmart top generative AI models from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and more.

Let’s say someone walks into an old-fashioned record store looking for the Bright Eyes song “False Advertising.” Upon finding and buying the album, she’d have little reason to fear that store employees might sneak into her house later and take it back from her. She’d also have no cause to think that the album was counterfeit and not by the band at all. Now let’s say instead that the same song inspires an artist to create a mural depicting the FTC’s greatest false ad cases, and the mural gets displayed in a local gallery. The artist might be surprised if the gallery later shuts its doors and refuses to return the mural . . . or if some other company secretly reuses bits of it to make something else.

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of AI in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of AI, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable. This means that any factual AI systems created in the short-run are at best decoys. When we think these systems capture something deep about ourselves and our thinking, we induce distorted and impoverished images of ourselves and our cognition. In other words, AI in current practice is deteriorating our theoretical understanding of cognition rather than advancing and enhancing it. The situation could be remediated by releasing the grip of the currently dominant view on AI and by returning to the idea of AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science. In reclaiming this older idea of AI, however, it is important not to repeat conceptual mistakes of the past (and present) that brought us to where we are today.

Timnit Gebru is not just a pioneering critic of dangerous AI datasets who calls bullshit on bad science pushed by the likes of OpenAI, or a tireless champion of racial, gender, and climate justice in computing. She's also someone who wants to build something different. This week on Reimagining, we t

Discover AI image statistics: the total number of AI images, the number of images created with Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and more.

Several years ago, while still a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini began to notice a troubling pattern in facial recognition technology––an inability to detect a wide range of skin tones and facial structures, even in widely available systems employed by Big Tech, government agencies, and law enforcement.

Google claims privacy should be available to everyone. But this claim requires a new definition of privacy that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Members of Ethiopia’s LGBTQ+ community say they face a wave of online harassment and physical attacks and blame much of it on the social media platform TikTok.

Generative AI systems are increasingly evaluated for their social impact, but there's no standardized approach yet. This paper from June 2023 presents a…

An overview of EU, US, and China AI regulations and governance initiatives, including key action points to help organizations with AI compliance.

The law, known as NYC 144, requires that employers hiring for jobs located in New York City comply with an annual bias audit. New Jersey, California, and D.C. are exploring similar legislation.

The Decision Tree for Responsible AI is a guide developed by AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) to help put ethical principles into… | 45 comments on LinkedIn

"Even if these systems were flawless, if they functioned perfectly, we still have an issue," said AJL founder Dr. Joy Buolamwini in a recent appearance on…

Faced with new legislation, Iowa's Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books 'contain a description or depiction of a sex act.'

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives US intelligence services backdoor access to data hosted on servers owned by American…

Screenwriters, actors, authors, and artists are fighting to ensure that human beings are not shunted to the margins of our culture.

Effective regulation of AI needs grounded science that investigates real harms, not glorified press releases about existential risks

Pak ‘n’ Save’s Savey Meal-bot cheerfully created unappealing recipes when customers experimented with non-grocery household items

Need help navigating the AI policy sphere? Here's a map of national and international strategies, a list of challenges and recommendations, and a set of resources.

Places to find US AI regulation: A list of 9 official repositories of laws, strategies, and other activities.

The 2023 legislative session has seen a surge in state AI laws proposed across the U.S., surpassing the number of AI laws proposed or passed in past legislative sessions.

The Global AI Standards Repository is the world’s first centralized, transparent notification system that captures AI and Autonomous and Intelligent Systems standards and standards in progress. If you would like to submit an entry, please use the submit button below. *This is a compilation of user submitted entries. The submitter is responsible for any and […]

The hubris and determination of tech leaders to control society is threatening our individual, societal, and business autonomy.

The Russia investigator on exposing assassinations and Putin’s plots, looking over his shoulder — and using a cat to find a secret agent

Effective regulation of AI needs grounded science that investigates real harms, not glorified press releases about existential risks

The one you’re reading this in, for starters.