Digital Ethics

Michael Smith discusses the environmental impacts of AI use and how society needs to rethink its use of this technology.

Tens of thousands of Discord users may have seen their ID data hacked. This doesn't bode well for the UK's Digital ID push.

Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. First, across 11 state-of-the-art AI models, we find that models are highly sycophantic: they affirm users' actions 50% more than humans do, and they do so even in cases where user queries mention manipulation, deception, or other relational harms. Second, in two preregistered experiments (N = 1604), including a live-interaction study where participants discuss a real interpersonal conflict from their life, we find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants' willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy.

A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility; the question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

People are using OpenAI's Sora 2 to generate videos of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking being brutalized in ghoulish ways.

Misinformation researchers say lifelike scenes could obfuscate truth and lead to fraud, bullying and intimidation

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In five years, more than a fifth of global energy demand will come from data centers alone.

U.S. Data Workers Speak Out About Big Tech’s Exploitation

The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.

This captures well the uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their identity. I'm sure we've all been in such situations, unfortunately, and we can all point to lots of situations where wank is prevalent in our current society.

The app best known for respecting privacy looks to grow, despite anti-privacy efforts

Andrew Chien told Fortune he's been a computer science for 40 years but we're close to "some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.”

The scrutiny of data centers has intensified because of tech company secrecy, energy consumption and societal impacts on customers, policymakers and communities.

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.

Debunking AI consciousness claims: Why Geoffrey Hinton's argument is flawed and why AI, despite its intelligence, is not truly conscious

By Christine HaskellOrigins in RejectionOver twenty years ago, a college sophomore sat in a dorm room, stewing after rejection, and built a crude website called FaceMash, where students could rate women like trading cards. Prank as power grab. Voyeurism coded as innovation.We like to file that under “youthful mistake.” It wasn’t. The logic metastasized. The same impulse that turns women into scores now turns all of us into streams of data—watchable, rankable, profitable—making “If you’re not pay

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says

Why LLMs should not be integrated with screen readers

When someone close to you passes away, dealing with their online accounts might be the last thing on your mind. We have some tips to make it less of a burden.

It’s not as simple as deleting a few accounts.

It’s a trippy time to have a library card.

Leading AI chatbots are now twice as likely to spread false information as they were a year ago.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests. Here, we ask, “Which humans?” Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological diversity around the globe that is not fully captured by the textual data on which current LLMs have been trained.

Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees.

A Manifesto