We have discussed in many posts here how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting—and could affect—different aspects of academic philosophy’s research ecosystem.
We have seen AI-written articles published in peer-reviewed journals and AI-written referee reports. As journals attempt to craft policies about AI use, some have been flooded with AI-generated submissions. More and more of philosophy’s institutions are organizing and encouraging research on AI. There are efforts underway to test and measure the capacity of AIs to produce philosophical research. And there is speculation about how the technology will change philosophical research, lead to new research tools, alter our institutions, and affect how credit and evaluation in the profession works. Meanwhile, some PhD students in philosophy are starting to use AI to write dissertations. A lot has happened in the six years since the first Daily Nous post about LLMs six years ago.
How should the profession respond to these and related developments? Is an effective coordinated response desirable? Is it possible?
To help facilitate our taking up of these and related questions, the Marc Sanders Foundation is organizing a conference on them that will bring together journal and academic press editors, scholars, and representatives from some of philosophy’s institutions.
Barry Lam (UC Riverside), associate director of the Sanders Foundation, shared the following information about it:
The Sanders Foundation is hoping the field of academic philosophy will develop a coordinated response to the presence and use of AI-tools in the publication and review of philosophical research. To that end, we are funding a conference at NYU on April 3rd and 4th 2027, bringing together editors of philosophy journals, editors of academic presses that publish a significant amount of philosophy, and philosophers who have developed views about the proper coordinated response to AI. Confirmed attendees include representatives from the APA, editors-in-chief of Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Mind, Nous, Ergo, Philosophy Compass, Analytic Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and from university presses, Oxford, Harvard, MIT, and Routledge. There will also be legal scholars who are up-to-date about AI and the laws of copyright. If you are a philosopher who has original data or research that speaks to these questions, and are interested in participating, please fill out the form at the URL. We do not plan to have many talks at the conference, but rather panel discussions and audience Q & As. All invitees will have all expenses paid.
You can find out more about the conference here.
Very timely. Best of luck, Barry and team!
I am skeptical that coordination on something like this is either possible or desirable for an entity as large and diverse as the philosophical community. But I do think that it is good to think about ways that sub-communities can coordinate in ways that produce a useful plurality of responses, without undercutting each other too much.
I think we might have an easier time of things getting the field of academic philosophy to develop a coordinated response to the problem of free will.
Like the situation in Palestine, this looks like the sort of issue on which individual philosophers should offer opinions rather than something on which philosophers should take an official stance.
Given the description of the conference, I think the title of this post needs a small correction:
“Coordinating the US Philosophy Profession’s Response to the Use of AI in Research”
Thank you on behalf of the rest of the world.
Agree, this is ridiculous , especially given that increasingly the UK is where the most high quality work in premier journals is coming from
As a UK-based person, I would like this to be true: is there some data to back it up, or just anecdotal evidence (which I share)?
Nrc was being snarky.
Ha, I thought I don’t miss these things, but there we go…
SCImago lists over 800 journals in Philosophy. For sure only a few of them match the quality of the journals already invited … Still, the whole initiative smells a bit of gatekeeping – not of the quality of researchers who publish in such prestigious venues, but of the dominance of research written in English and carried out within the Anglo-American world. If the goal is a coordinated response from “the profession,” the editors of these important journals might consider pushing the organizers to include the editors of non-English journals, or of journals outside the US/UK circuit.