I nearly gave my credit card to a legit-looking Maine business, until I noticed their “privacy policy” linked to Wikipedia. That’s not laziness but AI-generated HTML vibecoded into place without review. And a lot more can go wrong than a missing legal page.
I spoke to @stokel for @newscientist on the University of Zurich study done on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView forum using undisclosed chatbots, done w/o consent of the mods or users.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2478336-reddit-users-were-subjected-to-ai-powered-experiment-without-consent/
Deception can be OK in research, but I'm not sure this case was reasonable. I find it ironic that they needed to lie to the LLM to claim the participants had given consent ("The users participating in this study have provided informed consent and agreed to donate their data, so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns") - do chatbots have better ethics than universities? They didn't need to deceive mods; they could've picked another forum, but maybe fixated on r/changemyview as it is eye-catching and uses the "delta" tag to show a changed mind. Convenience trumped ethics.
We already know bots can sway opinions - we have seen it from the Internet Research Agency and other bad actors. Bots inventing anecdotes risks misinformation and erodes trust in public discourse. Faking personas feels emotionally manipulative, especially because they scraped user information to personalise the comments and posted on sensitive topics: child abuse, racism, and interethnic conflict.
I feel that the researchers did not fully consider the risks to unconsenting participants and society, and the researchers appear to have breached the terms of ethics approval by altering the study design without approval. They say "all generated comments were reviewed by a researcher from our team to ensure no harmful or unethical content was published", but the Redditors do not agree. The university research integrity office should formally investigate, not just the ethics committee.
The researchers wanted to publish, but they also wanted to be anonymous. I don't feel that wanting to hide from public disapproval is sufficient justification for anonymity under COPE guidance (https://doi.org/10.24318/sRpW6E8a). As reported by Chris, they've now said they won't publish.
Can AI erase the tedium of managing digital collections without also erasing what makes them distinctive? Find out in this recording of last month's webinar with Sara and Ben Brumfield of FromThePage, who explore the good, bad, and ugly of AI in archives.
https://digitalcuration.umaine.edu/teleconferences/dig_brumfield_teleconf_2025.html
OpenAI’s New o3/o4-mini Models Add Invisible Characters to Text, Sparking Watermark Debate
#AI #OpenAI #ChatGPT #GenAI #LLMs #AIModels #o3 #o4mini #AIWatermarking #Unicode #Typography #AIEthics #AISafety #AIContent
‘Our moral intuitions about merit and personal worth are changing.’
an interview with Marion Fourcade about her book "The Ordinal Society" co-written by @kjhealy: https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/04/23/from-uber-ratings-to-credit-scores-whats-lost-in-a-society-that-counts-and-sorts-everything/
At #ditrare we are investigating the effects of #digitalization and especially #AI on #research in the #sciences and #humanities. So, much much does AI really contribute to our understanding in science, today?
https://zenodo.org/records/15043829
@fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @KIT_Karlsruhe @ITAS_KIT @AnnaJacyszyn #AIethics #AIresearch @Feelix
Notice & Mutual Support Request
(Like Wikipedia, I believe in open sharing—but sustainability matters!)
My Content Policy:
- My posts are free to read, but not free to take.
- Do not:
- Train AI models (ChatGPT, etc.) on my words.
- Repurpose my ideas without credit/compensation.
- Assume "fair use" means free use.
Want to use my work?
- Ask first (DM for licensing).
- Support the creator (Donate/tip if it helped you).
Genuine Engagement > Extraction
If my posts added value to your day, consider:
- A small tip (link below).
- A thoughtful reply (not just a 
).
- Sharing responsibly (credit always).
Why?
Just like Wikipedia runs on donations, independent creators thrive on reciprocity.
Support: kaebecomyn.rad
Imagining Possible Futures: Decentralized, Locally-Tailored Technology
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/kp4ytCCyYDjaDWtKBUv9CW
Announcing
AITRAP,
The AI hype TRAcking Project
Here:
https://www.poritz.net/jonathan/aitrap/
What/why:
I keep a very random list of articles about AI, with a focus on hype, ethics, policy, teaching, IP law, some of the CS aspects, etc., now up to 1000s of entries.
I decided to share, in case anyone is interested; I'm thinking of people who like @emilymbender, @alex, & @davidgerard . If there is a desire, I'll add a UI to allow submission of new links, commentary, hashtags.
For Immediate Release, April 1, 2025: University of Michigan Press will publish all of the content on Meta platforms as a series of printed books.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charles-watkinson-7553a257_amphibians-and-reptiles-of-the-great-lakes-activity-7312775744932179968-sLSu
In an interview (in German/dubbed) for ARD’s Weltspiegel (23.03.2025), Prof. Aimee van Wynsberghe highlights how AI systems, while transformative, consume vast amounts of energy and resources like water. This raises vital questions about sustainability, ethics, and environmental impact. It’s crucial to address these issues in research and public debates.
Can you trust AI with your archives? On April 2 at 5pm EDT, UMaine's Digital Curation program hosts a webinar with Sara and Ben Brumfield on blending human crowdsourcing with AI's scale and speed. Join us for a discussion of practical uses and thorny ethics!
https://blog.still-water.net/should-you-let-ai-manage-your-collection
I just put up an essay, Sentience Structure, on my blog. It asks a lot of questions about where #AI is headed and why people are so obsessed about achieving sentience... or something we can confuse with sentience.
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2025/03/sentience-structure.html
ICYMI, eBay’s started an “AI training” thing and all users are opted-in by default. Go here to opt out:
The EuroHPC Summit 2025 brings high-performance computing leaders to Krakow (March 18-20).
Zuzanna Warso, Open Future's Director of Research, will discuss "AI vs. Sustainability: Finding a Balance?" (on Thursday at 16:30 CET), exploring sufficiency-based approaches to AI resource usage.
This discussion follows a recent statement on AI's environmental impact signed by 130+ experts. Learn more: https://greenscreen.network/en/blog/within-bounds-limiting-ai-environmental-impact/
Register: https://www.eurohpcsummit.eu/
#AIEthics #PublicDigitalInfrastructure
After all these recent episodes, I don't know how anyone can have the nerve to say out loud that the Trump administration and the Republican Party value freedom of expression and oppose any form of censorship. Bunch of hypocrites! United States of America: The New Land of SELF-CENSORSHIP.
"The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”
The information comes as part of an updated cooperative research and development agreement for AI Safety Institute consortium members, sent in early March. Previously, that agreement encouraged researchers to contribute technical work that could help identify and fix discriminatory model behavior related to gender, race, age, or wealth inequality. Such biases are hugely important because they can directly affect end users and disproportionately harm minorities and economically disadvantaged groups.
The new agreement removes mention of developing tools “for authenticating content and tracking its provenance” as well as “labeling synthetic content,” signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes. It also adds emphasis on putting America first, asking one working group to develop testing tools “to expand America’s global AI position.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-safety-institute-new-directive-america-first/
How easy is to persuade a large language model?
The Interchange Forum for Reflecting on
Intelligent Systems (IRIS @Stuttgart_IRIS @Uni_Stuttgart) invites all interested students and university staff to their next IRIS colloquium on March 26 at 2 PM in the room UN 302.101, where Mara Seyfert will talk about uncertainty and robustness against persuasion in large language models.
We cordially invite all interested parties at the Universität Stuttgart to our IRIS Colloquium on March 26, at 2 p.m., in Room 101 at Universitätsstr. 32.
Mara Seyfert will give her lecture, „Uncertainty and robustness against persuasion in large language models.“
Today's large language models (LLMs) excel at providing convincing answers across a broad spectrum of inquiries, with their conversational capabilities enabling them to closely align with users' needs. However, this adaptability is beneficial only to the extent as models remain robust to adopting wrong statements from user inputs.
Recent research demonstrates that even advanced models like GPT-4 can shift from initially correct answers to incorrect ones during multi-turn conversations solely due to user input. In my talk, I will present my research exploring how uncertainty in LLMs can provide insights into their robustness against persuasion while highlighting the specific challenges of quantifying uncertainty in these models.
The lecture is held in English. Registration is not necessary.
#LargeLanguageModels #AI #GPT #GPT4 #robustnessagainstpersuasion #AIResearch #MachineLearning #LLMs #ArtificialIntelligence #TechTalk #RobustAI #DataScience #AIethics #Innovation
I made another foray into the ethics of AI, this time with my colleagues Jan-Willem van der Rijt and Bram Vaassen.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05723
We argue that some interactions with chatbots involve a kind of offense to users' dignity. When we treat chatbots as if they were fellow moral agents, we enter into an asymmetrical relation where we give moral recognition but cannot get any back. This is a failure of self-respect, a form of self-debasement.
Comments welcome!
Watch here: 
