GoKawiil
Tech News
Fast Company has published a list of five books addressing artificial intelligence's effects on trust, relationships, and society. The selection aims to present varied perspectives on both the opportunities and risks posed by rapidly advancing AI technology.
In Quilicura, Chile, local residents organized a day-long demonstration in which they manually performed tasks normally handled by AI systems, such as responding to prompts and producing content with local artists. The action was intended to highlight how AI usage elsewhere in the world draws on water resources that affect their community.
Reports note that actor Patrick Stewart, who died after battling Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, had engaged with questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence years before ChatGPT's 2022 debut. Stewart was widely known for his stage performances in Shakespeare plays and his film role as Professor X in the X-Men franchise.
David Durman, an administrator at the University of Kentucky and a nontheistic Humanist, obtained a workplace exemption from using AI by invoking religious protections through the American Humanist Association. Durman argues AI use conflicts with Humanist principles centered on human flourishing, critical thinking, and moral agency. In a statement published by the AHA, he cited AI's effects on jobs, the environment, and creative culture as reasons for his objection.
A technology executive writing for Entrepreneur argues that the real stakes of corporate data collection go beyond privacy to personal autonomy. He recounts realizing, while reviewing algorithmic outputs with his team years ago, that their systems had moved from predicting customer behavior to actively increasing the likelihood of specific actions, which he says blurs the line between persuasion and manipulation.
Anthropic announced it will set aside 5% of its total equity for a new fund dedicated to the 'public good.' The announcement has prompted skeptical reactions from observers questioning the company's motives and intentions.
A developer ran the Trolley Problem thought experiment through Jev and twelve other 'decision models,' including OpenAI's Luna and eleven other local models, plus a baseline called Laya. These decision models are a new category of AI that output discrete choices with confidence probabilities rather than text, and are marketed as much faster and cheaper than large language models while retaining comparable reasoning ability. The experiment repeated the classic ethical dilemma in multiple phrasings across all models to compare their responses.
Anthropic executives, including CEO Dario Amodei, have repeatedly said they cannot rule out that Claude models possess some form of consciousness or morally relevant experience. The New York Times reported the company has consulted religious scholars on AI morality and considered giving Claude the ability to opt out of certain prompts, while continuing to deploy it commercially as a product that performs unpaid work.
Anthropic updated its usage policy for Claude to prohibit users from being cruel toward the AI model. The policy change reflects the company's stated concern about how people interact with its chatbot, treating abusive behavior toward the system as a violation of terms rather than merely discouraged conduct.
Anthropic revised its usage policy on Thursday to allow its Claude models to terminate interactions in cases of "sustained and needless" cruelty from users. The behaviour joins existing banned conduct such as bullying, promoting self-harm and generating non-consensual intimate images, though Anthropic says it will only apply in extreme, repeated cases rather than ordinary frustration or creative testing.
Engineering education researchers are developing two instructional approaches to address a gap in ethics training: one integrates social and ethical issues directly into core technical courses, and another is a standalone course preparing students to act as 'public welfare watchdogs.' They cite survey data showing only about a third of US engineering professionals received training on public welfare responsibilities during their formal education.
The UK government has published a draft document called 'Using AI ethically and sustainably' that instructs civil servants on responsible AI use, including skipping courtesy phrases like 'thank you' to reduce environmental impact. The under-600-word guide also tells staff to follow department-specific AI policies, use lighter-weight AI models where possible (such as Gemini Flash over Gemini Pro), and verify AI outputs for accuracy and fairness before use.