Articles

One way of thinking about the job of a philosophy instructor is that it’s about teaching students to disagree well. Yet when it comes to some moral, social, and political issues, students may seem reluctant to voice their own views in the classroom, let alone argue about them there. To help encourage and facilitate constructive disagreement among their students, a pair of philosophers have developed a new teaching tool: an AI-based chat platform that has already shown some promising results, and that they are making available to other teachers for free. In the following guest post, Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella (both at Carnegie Mellon) introduce us to this technology, which they’ve named Sway. Sway: an AI-Based Teaching Tool to Promote Constructive Disagreement by Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella Over half of American college students are afraid to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Other important issues like abortion, gun control, and affirmative action aren’t that far behind. Clearly, campuses need more respectful, scaffolded environments where students can practice constructive disagreement, honing skills like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, and critical thinking. We created a new kind of chat platform—called Sway—to address this need. Sway connects pairs of students who disagree over topics chosen by their instructor and then uses AI to facilitate more open, reasonable conversations between them. Sway scaffolds discussions in two main ways: Discussion guidance. An AI Guide participates in every chat. We’ve designed Guide to de-escalate tense moments, ensure students aren’t talking past each other, and make sure everyone’s voice gets heard. More importantly, Guide aims to improve student reasoning: it poses challenging questions, prompts students to clarify vague or incomplete arguments, unearths implicit assumptions, detects tensions and inconsistencies, and provides relevant factual information. Charitable rephrasing. When a student composes a message that contains unconstructive language, the platform suggests a better way for the student to make their point. This feature aims to preserve the core meaning of the original message while providing immediate feedback to help students develop a habit of clear and respectful communication. Students are free to dismiss suggested rephrasings, but doing so will invoke Guide; this ensures the conversation doesn’t get derailed. You can see Sway..

I believe that art and other forms of creative expression, including pop culture, can serve as catalysts for social change. Often artists are among the first to sense changes in societal currents and speculate about the future, and we have the imagination to find creative ways to communicate those topics to broad audiences.

visualization of everything on earth

Cursor AI tells user, “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”…

More governments seeking to keep millions of people offline amid conflicts, protests and political instability

An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

The Oscar-winning director’s latest film lays bare the brutal realities of capitalism and class exploitation.

Anthropic has quietly removed from its site several commitments the company made in conjunction with the Biden Administration in 2023.

Artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technologies are helping the Amazon’s Indigenous communities protect their land and traditions.

Imagine if digital matchmakers had no financial incentives.

Climate skepticism isn’t just ignorance—it’s a carefully orchestrated campaign that's more powerful than ever.

A reminder of why we need stories of hope in dark times

A European Solution to verify yourself online without compromising your privacy is coming up. And...

One conceptualisation of this new narrative is as a ‘Thrutopia’. This is the middle passage between utopia and dystopia. The hour is too late to avoid reaping the destruction we have sown, but neither is complex human civilisation beyond hope.

Jane (Veitzman) Muschenetz, MBA ’06, writes poetry that bridges the gap between science and art.

There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.

Only through regular injections of human writing can the models improve and the machines stay up to date.

What is the real, long-term cost of adopting a JavaScript framework?

The ability to generate, modify, and iterate on custom tools through simple conversation with AI has effectively bridged the long-standing gap between technical capability and creative vision.

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

Principles and practices to guide climate justice and digital rights campaigners in the responsible use of AI.

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

Joint statement from civil society for the AI Action Summit Signed by over 100 organizations. If you share our concerns and demands that AI systems be made compatible with our planetary boundaries, and are a civil society organization, can you can sign on here. INTRODUCTION We are at a critical threshold in our computational futures. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and its application across society is accelerating at an unprecedented scale.

Teaching about climate change isn’t easy when the last drops of hope for limiting warming to 1.5C evaporate with every US presidential decree. In response, I'm making a quantum leap in how I teach.

Nicolas Paries spoke to us about feeling confident integrating exactly.ai into design proposals, building eco-friendly websites and enabling autonomy for his clients.

Un-breaking our social networks requires fundamentally different architectures than the defaults currently used to build most tools for coordination.

A symbol of wisdom and renewal, the snake is a fitting portent for these transformative times.

The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

As the climate crisis deepens, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a contested force: some champion its potential to advance renewable energy, materials discovery, and large-scale...

Openvibe's clever app that integrates multiple open social networks, including Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, and Threads, just got a boost toward its future