Digital Ethics

In this report, through original research, we show how public opinion about AI is changing.

Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, said at wrongful death trial that Tesla let drivers ignore warnings.

We need to reckon with what ChatGPT is doing to the classroom and to human expression.

We examine recent research that asks whether current AI systems may be developing a capacity for "scheming" (covertly and strategically pursuing misaligned goals). We compare current research practices in this field to those adopted in the 1970s to test whether non-human primates could master natural language. We argue that there are lessons to be learned from that historical research endeavour, which was characterised by an overattribution of human traits to other agents, an excessive reliance on anecdote and descriptive analysis, and a failure to articulate a strong theoretical framework for the research. We recommend that research into AI scheming actively seeks to avoid these pitfalls. We outline some concrete steps that can be taken for this research programme to advance in a productive and scientifically rigorous fashion.

The Asian nation is importing thousands of tonnes of electronic waste per year, despite a ban.

Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls, according to Gartner.

Large Language Models fool you. They don't produce language, but place words in a row. But it's understandable that you think you are dealing with a clever computer. One that occasionally says something that resembles the truth and sounds nice and reliable. You are excused to believe in this magic of ‘AI’ but not after I tell you the trick.

Users have reuploaded 5,000 models used to generate nonconsensual sexual content of real people to Hugging Face after they were banned from Civitai.

A dataset was emailed to the wrong people, leading to fears of a Taliban ‘kill list’, a huge evacuation and an unprecedented superinjunction

Conservative government used superinjuction to hide error that put Afghans at risk and led to £2bn mitigation scheme

With the help of artificial intelligence, a man was 'brought back to life' at his killer's sentencing to deliver a victim's statement himself.

The agency in charge of parking in the city hung signs on meters to encourage people to download their new parking app, Mobicité. Some of the signs were vandalized with fake QR codes, which might direct people to a fraudulent website.

AI dating advice chatbot has been compromised

I’m Is there a point at which the sane part of the world just goes “maybe, just maybe we should stop, take a breath and ask ourselves ‘Is this a direction we want to be travelling’” before enacting first principles based regulation to alter the default trajectory? How a leader in the field unilaterally ran a test to see if there’s any pushback to him amplifying his voice via an AI trained to defer to his opinions? What possible additional warning would you need? How can we have binders of law and regulation on TV and Radio and Print, for good reasons and … fail for decades to regulate platforms? How long can the cognitive dissonance between “there will be growth and this is all teething problems on the way to tech utopia” and the clear and present trajectory to civilization collapse before model collapse can be maintained? How much longer will we be forced to endure performative AI ethics summits talking about aligning a technology whose makers have taken control of societies control mechanism and are long beyond alignment? Are we so far down the drain that no global government dares to pull the off switch on X out of fear of the oligarch controlling it or the US government and the platform having zero economic upsides, barely any jobs anymore? Can we get serious now? Break the whole AI and Agent ketamine haze for a moment and actually talk about how we deal with this all before it’s too late? Can we talk about how fundamental flaws like prompt injection destroy any chance for the technology to be made useful in the far marjority of hinted usecases in the next few years? How it forces us to abandon cybersecurity and corporate sovereignty to reap the “benefits”, how the “AI Layoffs” are not because the technology is working out but because it’s expensive. - before talking about “AI adoption”. How it’s essentially outsourcing, with all warts like knowledge transfer and disintermediation risk, but you pay for failed results too, per token, and the vendor forces you to do all the QA and shoulders no responsibility? Can we have leaders who lead instead of endlessly trying to just keep things running? Because we’re going to need that. We need bold leaders with understanding and vision. Globally. Not managers who just try to keep the box from falling apart, because the box is on the train tracks. | 17 comments on LinkedIn

Jevons Paradox in action! 📈 NVIDIA likes talking about how each generation of AI hardware is getting more efficient -- with Blackwell using 50x less energy per token than Hopper in 2022 -- but LLM usage (conservatively) went up from 100B tokens per month to 2T tokens per month 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿, according to Open Router (https://lnkd.in/evAWESXX). This means that efficiency gains are being outpaced by the growth in usage, by far! Focusing on efficiency alone is missing the forest for the trees... | 13 comments on LinkedIn

We live in an era where moral corruption is the current economic priority – an economy built on shortcuts, cutting corners, and breaking the law. All, of course…

A security vulnerability in McDonald's AI-powered hiring system has exposed the personal information of potentially 64 million job applicants.

An embarrassing exploit just uncovered the personal data of some 64 million McDonald's applicants sitting right out in the open.

Model Evaluation and Threat Research is an AI research charity that looks into the threat of AI agents! That sounds a bit AI doomsday cult, and they take funding from the AI doomsday cult organisat…

New research found our relationship to the technology is driven not only by what it can do, but also how we perceive it.

Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker warns that agentic A.I. could breach app-level security, threatening privacy for millions of users.

The NYT published a fascinating article last month on the conundrum of AI accuracy and reliability. They found that even as AI models were getting more powerful, they generated more errors, not fewer. In OpenAI’s own tests, their newest models hallucinated at higher rates than their previous models. One of their benchmarks is called a

Most of us don’t realise how much digital systems govern access to our basic public services, like education, health and housing. Even more terrifying is how...

Amendment to law will strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities, government says

To comply with a Trump executive order, Microsoft recently suspended the email account of an International Criminal Court prosecutor in the Netherlands who was investigating Israel for war crimes.

Ben Collins explains how The Onion is thriving by saying what others won’t—and why human-created satire matters in a media landscape increasingly saturated by noise and A.I. slop.

One of the popular uses of "AI" that I truly do not understand involves "brainstorming" – and okay, I admit, I truly do not understanding using "AI" at all with what we know about its politically, psychologically, cognitively, and environmentally destructive effects. I've written before about how "brainstorming" is a Cold War invention, and how marketing has convinced us that we're lacking something that only its products or services can fulfill, that "creativity" is something special that few p

The 'Empire of AI' author joins our new weekly Q&A series with cultural tastemakers to explore the intersection of their craft and the news.

AI in schools isn’t progress — it’s a sign of how far we’ve strayed from the purpose of education.