“Artificial Intelligence” and cognate topics
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Some skepticism about AI enthusiasm among philosophers
MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUG. 24–A LIVELY AND INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENT THREAD (ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME) Philosopher Dan Kaufman writes: Over the last year, philosophy social media has discussed a number of academic philosophers who are actively embracing AI in their research. Perusing these posts — and the comments that follow — reveals a…
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Graduate admissions in the age of AI, redux
Last January, we had a thread about how to protect the integrity of philosophy graduate admissions given the possibility that applicants might be using LLMs to generate some or all of their writing samples. I thought it would be useful to have a follow-up thread to see what worked and what didn’t. For those new…
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The latest in scams targeting academics: Amy Bloom, the “art curator” in Monaco
The saga continues: philosopher Warren Goldfarb (emeritus, Harvard) shared the email below with me, suspecting it too was a scam: From: Amy Bloom <amybloom1254@gmail.com> Subject: Reflections on Logic, Philosophy, and Cultural Narratives Date: March 13, 2026 at 4:29:11 PM EDT To: [omitted] Dear Professor Goldfarb, I’m Amy, an art curator from Monaco. I work with collectors…
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Should you agree to let your books be used for LLM training?
Philosopher Daniel Wodak writes: I was wondering if you had any advice on the following issue, which might be a good topic for your blog. CUP asked me to sign an addendum authorizing them to in effect use the text of my Element in training LLMs, with the promise that I’d get 20% of unspecified…
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This is encouraging: majority of Americans want to redistribute wealth from AI companies to society
Let’s hope it happens, but this will require the prudent wing of the ruling class, i.e., the Democrats, to ‘betray’ the (short-term) interests of their class, much as FDR did. (As some readers will know, FDR was regularly accused of being a traitor to his class, whereas in reality he saved them from extinction.)
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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.
These seem like sensible, measured comments. But I do have a question about (1). You ask: “Is the value of…