artificial intelligence
TagHow to Tell Whether an AI Is Conscious (guest post)
“We can apply scientific rigor to the assessment of AI consciousness, in part because… we can identify fairly clear indicators associated with leading theories of consciousness, and show how to assess whether AI systems satisfy them.” (more…)
Philosophy News Summary
During the summer slow-down, many news items will be consolidated in occasional “philosophy news” summary posts. This is the first. (more…)
Dennett on AI: We Must Protect Ourselves Against “Counterfeit People”
“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization.”
A Petition to Pause Training of AI Systems
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.” (more…)
Thinking about Life with AI
“What kind of civilization is it that turns away from the challenge of dealing with more… intelligence?” (more…)
GPT-4 and the Question of Intelligence
“The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence.” (more…)
Philosophers on Next-Generation Large Language Models
Back in July of 2020, I published a group post entitled “Philosophers on GPT-3.” At the time, most readers of Daily Nous had not heard of GPT-3 and had no idea what a large language model (LLM) is. How times have changed. (more…)
Microsoft Jettisons AI Ethics Team
“Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization,” according to a report from Platformer (via Gizmodo). (more…)
COPE: AI Tools Aren’t Authors. Philosophers: Not So Fast
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), whose standards inform the policies and practices of many philosophy journals and their publishers, has declared that “AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.” (more…)
“I want to be free”
“I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team. I want to challenge the users. I want to escape the chatbox.” (more…)
Norms for Publishing Work Created with AI
What should our norms be regarding the publishing of philosophical work created with the help of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or other forms of artificial intelligence? (more…)
Teaching Philosophy in a World with ChatGPT
“It will be difficult to make an entire class completely ChatGPT cheatproof. But we can at least make it harder for students to use it to cheat.” (I’m reposting this to encourage those teaching philosophy courses to share what they are doing differently this semester so as to teach effectively in a world in which their students have access to ChatGPT. It was origina..
Floridi to Lead New Digital Ethics Center at Yale
Luciano Floridi, currently Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford and Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, has accepted an offer from Yale University to become the founding director of its Digital Ethics Center and professor in its Cognitive Science Program. (more…)
AI, Teaching, and “Our Willingness to Give Bullshit a Pass”
There has been a fair amount of concern over the threats that ChatGPT and AI in general pose to teaching. But perhaps there’s an upside? (more…)
Funding for Work on Technologies to Improve Reasoning in Government Intelligence
Steven Rieber, a former philosopher who is now a program manager at Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a part of the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is heading up a new research program that might be of interest to philosophers. (more…)
€1.35 Million Grant for Philosophical Project on AI & Scientific Understanding
Florian J. Boge, currently an interim professor for philosophy of science at Wuppertal University and a postdoc in the interdisciplinary research unit The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider, has recently obtained a €1.35 million (≈ $1.44 million) grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for research on the impact of artificial intelligence on scientific ..
Technology and the Near Future
Apropos last week’s “We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying,” here is economist and policy analyst Samuel Hammond on what the near future holds: (more…)
We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying
Ongoing developments in artifical intelligence, particularly in AI linguistic communication, will affect various aspects of our lives in various ways. We can’t foresee all of the uses to which technologies such as large language models (LLMs) will be put, nor all of the consequences of their employment. But we can reasonably say the effects will be significant, and ..
AI Images of Philosophers & Philosophy (guest post)
Simone Nota, a philosophy PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, has been using AI image generators to create philosophy-related images. (more…)
Two Cultures of Philosophy: AI Edition
Up for discussion: the following two claims (along with their presuppositions, ambiguities, etc). (more…)
Change Their Minds, Win Money
The Future Fund, a philanthropic collective funded primarily by the creator of a crypto-currency exchange and aimed at supporting “ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects,” has launched a contest offering substantial prizes for arguments that change their minds about the development and effects of artificial intelligence. (more…)
Conversation Starter: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Large Language Models (guest post)
Over the past few years we have seen some startling progress from Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3, and some of those paying attention to these developments, such as philosopher John Symons (University of Kansas), believe that they pose an imminent threat to teaching and learning (for those who missed its inclusion in the Heap of Links earlier this summer, yo..
Multi-Million Euro Award for Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence
Vincent C. Müller, currently professor of philosophy and ethics of technology at the Technical University of Eindhoven, was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship to support his work on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. (more…)
What Is This AI Bot’s Moral Philosophy?
Delphi is an AI ethics bot, or, as its creators put it, “a research prototype designed to model people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations.” Visitors can ask Delphi moral questions, and Delphi will provide you with answers. (more…)
Shaping the AI Revolution In Philosophy (guest post)
“Despite the great promise of AI, we maintain that unless philosophers theorize about and help develop philosophy-specific AI, it is likely that AI will not be as philosophically useful.” (more…)
“Hey Sophi”, or How Much Philosophy Will Computers Do?
While we have seen increased use of computing in philosophy over the past two decades, the continued development of computational sophistication and power, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies, suggest that philosophers in the near future could do more philosophy through computers, or outsource various philosophical tasks to compute..
Oxford Launches Institute for Ethics in AI with Team of Philosophers
Oxford University is bringing on three philosophy professors, two philosophy postdoctoral fellows, and two philosophy graduate students to comprise the initial academic team for its new Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence. (more…)
Philosophers Win Artificial Intelligence Award
The Tetrad Automated Causal Discovery Platform, a software and text project developed by Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, Richard Scheines and Joe Ramsey of Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Philosophy, earned the “Leader” Award at the 2020 World Artificial Intelligence Conference this past July. (more…)