AI Ethics and Science Wars 2
In the 1990s, the “science wars” asked whether science was objective or culturally constructed. Today, AI ethics raises a different but related question: can ethical norms be operationalized as optimization targets and enforced through technical architecture? Alignment is not the same as ethical agency. Guardrails are not the same as deliberation. And product safety is…
on the future of the teaching of writing
In ebr: electronic book review, Anna Mills, Jon Ippolito, Maha Bali, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Annette Vee, and Marc Watkins have published a series titled The Transformers: Imagining the Future of the Teaching of Writing. My title borrows from theirs. They raise two important and related questions for writing instructors: Certainly there are many…
AI Agents and the Return of the Deodand
AI agents are the current shift in frontier AI. Much of the development has begun in coding environments, but it is not hard to imagine that by the time our current students graduate, corporations will routinely employ internal AI agents—and many individuals may use personal ones. What can these agents do? We are still at…
AI’s non-ethical output
I’ve been working around this idea for a while as part of my book project, but I am starting to see more similar observations being made about AI output (i.e., what we encounter). Though perhaps we can find hints of this in earlier time-critical media, as those primarily replayed already inscribed media, putting them into…
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 