“Artificial Intelligence” and cognate topics
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More on philosophers working for AI companies…
…in the NYT. It’s pretty thin on facts, and pretty thick on stereotypes about philosophers and philosophy students. And some of its “facts” aren’t even accurate: Nietzsche did not survive on the generosity of friends and family, as the article says, he worked for 11 years as a classics professor and then received a disability…
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Why AI companies are hiring philosophers
Amusing piece in The Economist. It would be nice if we had some actual figures on the number of philosophers being hired. Luciano Floridi “describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a ‘haemorrhaging,’” which is obviously nonsense: there are still far more philosophy PhDs than there are jobs, even if a handful are…
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The demand for “philosophy of AI” in job ads is as huge as you thought it was
Based on this analysis by philosopher Charles Lassiter, more than 20% of job ads now mention AI. This is going to result in a lot of weak appointments, given how few philosophers really have expertise in this area.
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First the “book club” scam, now the scam of fake editors seeking to learn about your work (UPDATED with another example targeting a philosopher)
AI clearly generates many of the fake “book club” solicitations to authors of new books, and now there’s a new scam: fake editors of actual publishing houses (or impersonating actual academics) soliciting information about an author’s work. One giveaway in the cases noted: the “editors” used gmail and outlook email addresses, rather than university or…
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Philosopher Daniel Greco is training AI systems to replace him
He explains at CHE. An excerpt: [O]ne of my main takeaways from gig work [for AI companies] over the last few months is just how hard it is to catch the most sophisticated frontier LLMs in philosophical blunders. When ChatGPT first emerged, a common pastime among my philosopher friends was posting screenshots on social media of its…
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“Growing market demand for ontologists”
A software engineer comments.
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AI prefers to hire resumes written by AI
Oy veh. Pretty pathetic.
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Frequency of fabricated references (probably AI generated) in biomedical papers over a three-year period
From The Lancet: Among 97·1 million verified references [across 2.5 million papers], we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7…
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Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures
Bizarre and pretty outrageous: Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are…
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Does AI degrade human comprehension and reasoning?
Law professors at the University of Minnesota investigated, and came up with a somewhat more optimistic answer than a lot of research–although careful structuring of how and when it’s used is probably needed to avoid negative effects. Comments from readers who actually read the paper are welcome.
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Economists (i.e., adherents of the failed empirical science of neoclassical economics) “once dismissed the AI job threat”…
…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a…
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AI cheating and pangram redux
Philosopher Stefan Sciaraffa at McMaster in Canada writes: I read the Unherd piece…I align with its general spirit. However there is one key claim that I’m not so sure about. I’ve been using Pangram. It has a vanishingly small false positive rate. Folks at the business school at your university have verified this. I’ve run…
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Speaking of the legal job market…
…no indication yet that AI is affecting hiring by large law firms.
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“AI will destroy universities”
That’s political theorist Paul Sagar’s not implausible assessment; an excerpt: I…teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential…. Specifically, students who use LLMs to…
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Even judges cannot figure out whether lawyers are incompetent or using AI!
Philosophy graduate student Charles Bakker sends me this interesting article from Canada about an “Ontario lawyer [who] filed seven completely fake quotations from court cases to a judge while arguing in court, but claims it was human error and not artificial intelligence tools behind it. A skeptical judge wonders if the lawyer’s claim makes things…
With the disclaimer that I read Appiah’s ‘report’ quickly, and only had access to the excerpt of Kramnick’s that you…