For us personally, this means that we no longer use generative AI – neither for private nor professional purposes.

To Gen or Not To Gen: The Ethical Use of Generative AI 33 minute read This blog entry started out as a translation of an article that my colleague Jakob and I wrote for a German magazine. After that we added more stuff and enriched it by additional references and sources. We aim at giving an overview about many - but not all - aspects that we learned about GenAI and that we consider relevant for an informed ethical opinion. As for the depth of information, we are just scratching the surface; hopefully, the loads of references can lead you to diving in deeper wherever you want. Since we are both software developers our views are biased and distorted. Keep also in mind that any writing about a “hot” topic like this is nothing but a snapshot of what we think to know today. By the time you read it the authors’ knowledge and opinions have already changed. Last Update: December 8, 2025. Table of ContentsPermalink Abstract About us Johannes Link Jakob Schnell Introduction Ethics, what does that even mean? Clarification of terms Basics Can LLMs think? What LLMs are good at GenAI as a knowledge source GenAI in software development Actual vs. promised benefits Harmful aspects of GenAI GenAI is an ecological disaster Power Water Electronic Waste GenAI threatens education and science GenAI is destroying the free internet. GenAI is a danger to democracy GenAI versus human creativity Digital colonialism Political aspects Conclusion Can there be ethical GenAI? How to act ethically AbstractPermalink ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. The number of generative AI applications (GenAI) and models is growing every day. In the field of software development in particular, code generation, coding assistants and vibe coding are on everyone’s lips. Like any technology, GenAI has two sides. The great promises are offset by numerous disadvantages: immense energy consumption, mountains of electronic waste, the proliferation of misinformation on the internet and the dubious handling of intellectual property are just a few of the many negative aspects. Ethically responsible behaviour requires us to look at all the advantages, disadvantages and collateral damages of a technology before we use it or recommend its use to others. In this article, we examine both sides and eventually arrive at our personal and naturally subjective answer to whether and how GenAI can be used in an ethical manner. About usPermalink Johannes LinkPermalink … has been programming for over 40 years, 30 of them professionally. Since the end of the last century, extreme programming and other human-centred software development approaches have been at the heart of his work. The meaningful and ethical implementation of his private and professional life has been his driving force for years. He has been involved with GenAI since the early days of OpenAI’s GPT language models. More about Johannes can be found at https://johanneslink.net. Jakob SchnellPermalink … studied mathematics and computer science and has been working as a software developer for 5 years. He works as a lecturer and course director in university and non-university settings. As a youth leader, he also comes into regular contact with the lives of children and young people. In all these environments, he observes the growing use of GenAI and its impact on people. IntroductionPermalink Ethics, what does that even mean?Permalink Ethical behaviour sounds like the title of a boring university seminar. However, if you look at the wikipedia article of the term 1, you will find that ‘how individuals behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas’ is at the heart of the definition. So it’s about us as humans taking responsibility and weighing up whether and how we do or don’t do certain things based on our values. We have to consider ethical questions in our work because all the technologies we use and promote have an impact on us and on others. Therefore, they are neither neutral nor without alternative. It is about weighing up the advantages and potential against the damage and risks; and that applies to everyone, not just us personally. Because often those who benefit from a development are different from those who suffer the consequences. As individuals and as a society, we have the right to decide whether and how we want to use technologies. Ideally, this should be in a way that benefits us all; but under no circumstances should it be in a way that benefits a small group and harms the majority. The crux of the matter is that ethical behaviour does not come for free. Ethics are neither efficient nor do they enhance your economic profit. That means that by acting according to your values you will, at some point, have to give something up. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t have values - just opinions. Clarification of termsPermalink When we write ‘generative AI’ (GenAI), we are referring to a very specific subset of the many techniques and approaches that fall under the term ‘artificial intelligence’. Strictly speaking, these are a variety of very different approaches that range from symbolic logic, over automated planning up to the broad field of machine learning (ML). Nowadays most effort, hype and money goes into deep learning (DL): a subfield of ML that uses multi-layered artificial neural networks to discover statistical correlations (aka patterns) based on very large amounts of training data in order to reproduce those patterns later. Large language models (LLM) and related methods for generating images, videos and speech now make it possible to apply this idea to completely unstructured data. While traditional ML methods often managed with a few dozen parameters, these models now work with several trillion (10^12) parameters. In order for this to produce the desired results, both the amount of training data and the training duration must be increased by several orders of magnitude. This brings us to the definition of what we mean by ‘GenAI’ in this article: Hyperscaled models that can only be developed, trained and deployed by a handful of companies in the world. These are primarily the GenAI services provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, or based on these services. We also focus primarily on language models; the generation of images, videos, speech and music plays only a minor role in this article. Our focus on hyperscale services does not mean that other ML methods are free of ethical problems; however, we are dealing with a completely different order of magnitude of damage and risk here. For example, there do exist variations of GenAI that use the same or similar techniques, but on a much smaller scale and restricted domains (e.g. AlphaFold 2). These approaches tend to bring more value with fewer downsides. BasicsPermalink GenAI models are designed to interpolate and extrapolate 3, i.e. to fill in the gaps between training data and speculate beyond the limits of the training data. Together with the stochastic nature of the training data, this results in some interesting properties: GenAI models ‘invent’ answers; with LLMs, we like to refer to this as ‘hallucinations’. GenAI models do not know what is true or false, good or bad, efficient or effective, only what is statistically probable or improbable in relation to training data, context and query (aka prompt). GenAI models cannot explain their output; they have no capability of introspection. What is sold as introspection is just more output, with the previous output re-injected. GenAI models do not learn from you; they only draw from their training material. The learning experience is faked by reinjecting prior input into a conversation’s context 4. The context, i.e. the set of input parameters provided, is decisive for the accuracy of the generated result, but can also steer the model in the wrong direction. Increasing the context window makes a query much more computation-intensive - likely in a quadratic way. Therefore, the promised increase of “maximum context window” of many models is mostly fake 5. The reliability of LLMs cannot be fundamentally increased by even greater scaling 6. Can LLMs think?Permalink Proponents of the language-of-thought hypothesis 7 believe it is possible for purely language-based models to acquire the capabilities of the human brain – reasoning, modelling, abstraction and much more. Some enthusiasts even claim that today’s models have already acquired this capability. However, recent studies 8 9 show that today’s models are neither capable of genuine reasoning nor do they build internal models of the world. Moreover, “…according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language 10” and there is fundamental scientific doubt that achieving human cognition through computation is achievable in practice let alone by scaling up training of deep networks 11. An example of a lack of understanding of the world is the prompt ‘Give me a random number between 0 and 50’. The typical GenAI response to this is ‘27’, and it is significantly more reliable than true randomness would allow. (If you don’t believe it, just try it out!) This is because 27 is the most likely answer in the GenAI training data – and not because the model understands what ‘random’ means. ‘Chain of Thought (CoT)’ approaches and ‘Reasoning models’ attempt to improve reasoning by breaking down a prompt, the query to the model, into individual (logical) steps and then delegating these individual steps back to the LLM. This allows some well-known reasoning benchmarks to be met, but it also multiplies the necessary computational effort by a factor between 30 and 700 12. In addition, multistep reasoning lets individual errors chain together to form large errors. And yet, CoT models do not seem to possess any real reasoning abilities 13 14 and improve the overall accuracy of LLMs only marginally 15. The following thought experiment from 16 underscores the lack of real “thinking” capabilities: LLMs have simultaneous access to significantly more knowledge than humans. Together with the postulated ability of LLMs to think logically and draw conclusions, new insights should just fall from the sky. But they don’t. Getting new insights from LLMs would require these to be already encoded in the existing training material, and to be decoded and extracted by pure statistical means. What LLMs are good atPermalink Undoubtedly, LLMs represent a major qualitative advance when it comes to extracting information from texts, generating texts in natural and artificial languages, and machine translation. But even here, the error rate, and above all the type of error (‘hallucinations’), is so high that autonomous, unsupervised use in serious applications must be considered highly negligent. GenAI as a knowledge sourcePermalink As we have pointed out above, LLMs cannot differentiate between true and false - regardless of the training material. It does not answer the question “What is XYZ?” but the question “How would an answer to question ‘What is XYZ?’ look like?”. Nevertheless, many people claim that the answers that ChatGPT and alike provide for the typical what-how-when-who queries are good enough and often better than what a “normal” web search would have given us. Arguably, this is the most prevalent use case for “AI” bots today. The problem is that most of the time we will never learn about the inaccuracies, left-outs, distortions and biases that the answer contained - unless we re-check everything, which defies the whole purpose of speeding up knowledge retrieval. The less we already know, the better the “AI’s” answer looks to us, but the less equipped we are to spot the problems. A recent by the BBC and 22 Public Service Media organizations shows that 45% of all “AI” assistants’ answers on questions about news and current affairs have significant errors 17. Moreover, LLMs are easy prey for manipulation - either by the service providing organization or by third parties. A recent study claims that even multi-billion-parameter models can be “poisoned” by injecting just a few corrupted documents 18. So, if anything is at stake all output from LLMs must be carefully validated. Doing that, however, would contradict the whole point of using “AI” to speed up knowledge acquisition. GenAI in software developmentPermalink The creation and modification of computer programmes is considered a prime domain for the use of LLMs. This is partly because programming languages have less linguistic variance and ambiguity than natural languages. Moreover, there are many methods for automatically checking generated source code, such as compiling, static code analysis and automated testing. This simplifies the validation of generated code and thereby gives an additional feeling of trust. Nevertheless, individual reports on the success of coding assistants such as Copilot, Cursor, etc. vary greatly. They range from ‘completely replacing me as a developer’ to ‘significantly hindering my work’. Some argue that coding agents considerably reduce the time they have to invest in “boilerplate” work, like writing tests, creating data transfer objects or connecting your domain code to external libraries. Others counter by pointing out that delegating these drudgeries to GenAI makes you miss opportunities to get rid of them, e.g. by introducing a new abstraction or automating parts of your pipeline, and to learn about the intricacies and failure modes of the external library. Other than old-school code generation or code libraries prompting a coding agent is not “just another layer of abstraction”. It misses out on several crucial aspects of a useful abstraction: Its output is not deterministic. You cannot rely on any agent producing the same code next time you feed it the same prompt. The agent does not hide the implementation details, nor does it allow you to reliably change those details if the previous implementation turns out to be inadequate. Code that is output by an LLM, even if it is generated “for free”, has to be considered and maintained each time you touch the related logic or feature. The agent does not tell you if the amount of details you give in your prompt is sufficient for figuring out an adequate implementation. On the contrary, the LLM will always fill the specification holes with some statistically derived assumptions. Sadly, serious studies on the actual benefits of GenAI in software development are rare. The randomised trial by Metr 19 provides an initial indication, measuring a decline in development speed for experienced developers. An informal study by ThoughtWorks estimates the potential productivity gain from using GenAI in software development at around 5-15% 20. If “AI coding” were increasing programmers’ productivity by any big number, we would see a measurable growth of new software in app stores and OSS repositories. But we don’t, the numbers are flat at best 2122. But even if we assume a productivity increase in coding through GenAI, there are still two points that further diminish this postulated efficiency gain: Firstly, the results of the generation must still be cross-checked by human developers. However, it is well known that humans are poor checkers and lose both attention and enjoyment in the process. Secondly, software development is only to a small extent about writing and changing code. The most important part is discovering solutions and learning about the use of these solutions in their context. Peter Naur calls this ‘programming as theory building’ 23. Even the perfect coding assistant can therefore only take over the coding part of software development. For the essential rest, we still need humans. If we now also consider the finding that using AI can relatively quickly lead to a loss of problem-solving skills 24 or that these skills are not acquired at all, then the overall benefit of using GenAI in professional software development is more than questionable. As long as programming - and every technicality that comes with it - will not be fully replaced by some kind of AI, we will still need expert developers who can programm, maintain and debug code to the finest level of detail. Where, we wonder, will those senior developers come from when companies replace their junior staff with coding agents? Actual vs. promised benefitsPermalink If you read testimonials about the use of GenAI that people perceive as successful, you will mostly encounter scenarios in which ‘AI’ helps to make tasks that are perceived as boring, unnecessarily time-consuming or actually pointless faster or more pleasant. So it’s mainly about personal convenience and perceived efficiency. Entertainment also plays a major role: the poem for Grandma’s birthday, the funny song for the company anniversary or the humorous image for the presentation are quickly and supposedly inexpensively generated by ‘AI’. However, the promises made by the dominant GenAI companies are quite different: solving the climate crisis, providing the best medical advice for everyone, revolutionising science, ‘democratising’ education and much more. GPT5, for example, is touted by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as follows: ‘With GPT-5, it’s now like talking to an expert — a legitimate PhD-level expert in any area you need […] they can help you with whatever your goals are.’ 25 However, to date, there is still no actual use case that provides a real qualitative benefit for humanity or at least larger groups. The question ‘What significant problem (for us as a society) does GenAI solve?’ remains unanswered. On the contrary: While machine learning and deep learning methods certainly have useful applications, the most profitable area of application for ‘AI’ at present is the discovery and development of new oil and gas fields 26. Harmful aspects of GenAIPermalink But regardless of how one assesses the benefits of this technology, we must also consider the downsides, because only then can we ultimately make an informed and fair assessment. In fact, the range of negative effects of hyperscaled generative AI that can already be observed is vast. Added to this are numerous risks that have the potential to cause great social harm. Let’s take a look at what we consider to be the biggest threats: GenAI is an ecological disasterPermalink PowerPermalink The data centres required for training and operating large generative models 27 far exceed today’s dimensions in terms of both number and size. The projected data centre energy demand in the USA is predicted to grow from 4.4% of total electricity in 2023 to 22% in 2028 28. In addition, the typical data centre electricity mix is more CO2-intensive than the average mix. There is an estimated raise of ~11 percent for coal generated electricity in the US, as well as tripled emissions of greenhouse gases worldwide by 2030 - compared to the scenario without GenAI technology 29. Just recently Sam Altman from OpenAI blogged some numbers about the energy and water usage of ChatGPT for “the average query” 30. On the one hand, an average is rather meaningless when a distribution is heavily unsymmetric; the numbers for queries with large contexts or “chain of reasoning” computations would be orders of magnitude higher. Thus, the potential efficiency gains from more economical language models are more than offset by the proliferation of use, e.g. through CoT approaches and ‘agent systems’. On the other hand, big tech’s disclosure of energy consumption (e.g. by Google 31) is intentionally selective. Ketan Joshi goes into quite some details why experts think that the AI industry is hiding the full picture 32. Since building new power plants - even coal or gas fuelled ones - takes a lot of time, data center companies are even reviving old jet engines for powering their new hyper-scalers 33. You have to be aware that those engines are not only much more noisy than other power plants but also pump out nitrous oxide, one of the main chemicals responsible for acid rain 34. WaterPermalink Another problem is the immensely high water consumption of these data centres 35. After all, cooling requires clean water in drinking quality in order to not contaminate or clog the cooling pipes and pumps. Already today, new data centre locations are competing with human consumption of drinking water. According to Bloomberg News about two-thirds of data-centers that were built or developed in 2022 are located in areas that are already under “water-stress” 36. In the US alone “AI servers […] could generate an annual water footprint ranging from 731 to 1,125 million m3” 37. It’s not only an American problem, though. In other areas of the world the water-thirsty data centers also compete with the drinking water supply for humans 38. Electronic WastePermalink Another ecological problem is being noticeably exacerbated by ‘AI’: the amount of electronic waste (e-waste) that we ship mainly to “Third World” countries and which is responsible for soil contamination there. Efficient training and querying of very large neural networks requires very large quantities of specialised chips (GPUs). These chips often have to be replaced and disposed of within two years. The typical data center might not last longer than 3 to 5 years before it has to be rebuilt in large parts39. In summary, it can be said that GenAI is at least an accelerator of the ecological catastrophe that threatens the earth. And it is the argument for Google, Amazon and Microsoft to completely abolish their zero CO2 targets 40 and replace them with investments of several hundred billion dollars for new data centers. GenAI threatens education and sciencePermalink People often try to use GenAI in areas where they feel overloaded and overwhelmed: training, studying, nursing, psychotherapeutic care, etc. The fields of application for ‘AI’ are therefore a good indication of socially neglected and underfunded areas. The fact that LLMs are very good at conveying the impression of genuine knowledge and competence makes their use particularly attractive in these areas. A teacher under the simultaneous pressure of lesson preparation, corrections and covering for sick colleagues turns to ChatGPT to quickly create an exercise sheet. A student under pressure to get good grades has their English essay corrected by ‘AI’. The researcher under pressure to publish will ‘save’ research time by reading the AI-generated summary of relevant papers – even if they are completely wrong in terms of content 41. Tech companies like OpenAI and Microsoft play on that situation by offering their ‘AI’ for free or for little money to students and universities. The goal is obvious: Students that get hooked on outsourcing some of their “tedious” task to a service will continue to use - and eventually buy - this service after graduation. What falls by the wayside are problem-solving skills, engagement with complex sources, and the generation of knowledge through understanding and supplementing existing knowledge. Some even argue that AI is destroying critical education and learning itself 42: Students aren’t just learning less; their brains are learning not to learn. The training cycle of schools and universities is fast. Teachers are already reporting that pupils and students have acquired noticeably less competence in recent years, but have instead become dependent on unreliable ‘tools’ 43. The real problem with using GenAI to do assignments is not cheating, but students “are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.” 44 GenAI is destroying the free internet.Permalink The fight against bots on the internet is almost as old as the internet itself – and has been quite successful so far. Multifactor authentication, reCaptcha, honeypots and browser fingerprinting are just a few of the tools that help protect against automated abuse. However, GenAI takes this problem to a new level – in two ways. To make ‘the internet’ usable as the main source for training LLMs, AI companies use so-called ‘crawlers’. These essentially behave like DDoS attackers: They send tens of thousands of requests at once, from several hundred IPs in a very short time. Robot.txt files are ignored; instead, the source IP and user agent are obscured 45. These practices have massive disadvantages for providers of genuine content: Costs for additional bandwidth. Lost advertising revenue, as search engines now offer LLM-generated summaries instead of links to the sources. This threatens the existence of remaining independent journalism in particular 46. Misuse of own content for AI-supported competition. If the place where knowledge is generated is separated from the place where it is consumed, and if this makes the performance of generation even more opaque than before, the motivation to continue generating knowledge also declines. For projects such as Wikipedia, this means fewer donors and fewer contributors. Open communities often have no other option but to shut themselves off. Another aspect is the flooding of the internet with generated content that cannot be automatically distinguished from non-generated content. This content overwhelms the maintainers of open source software or portals such as Wikipedia 47. If this content is then also entered by humans – often in the belief that they are doing good – it is no longer possible to take action against the methodology. In the long run, this means that less and less authentic training material will lead to increasingly poor results from the models. Last but not least, autonomously acting agents make the already dire state of internet security much worse 48. Think of handing all your personal data and credentials to a robot that is distributing and using that data across the web, wherever and whenever it deems it necessary for reaching some goal. is controlled by LLMs who are vulnerable to all kinds of prompt injection attacs 49. is controlled by and reporting to companies that do not have your best interest in mind. has no awareness and knowledge about the implication of its actions. is acting on your behalf and thereby making you accountable. GenAI is a danger to democracyPermalink The manipulation of public opinion through social media precedes the arrival of LLMs. However, this technology gives the manipulators much more leverage. By flooding the web with fake news, fake videos and fake everything undemocratic (or just criminal) parties make it harder and harder for any serious media and journalism to get the attention of the public. People no longer have a common factual basis, which is necessary for all social negotiations. If you don’t agree on at least some basic facts, arguing about policies and measures to take is pointless. Without negotiations democracy will be dying; in many parts of the world it already is. GenAI versus human creativityPermalink Art and creativity are also threatened by generative AI. The impact on artists’ incomes of logos, images and illustrations now being easily and quickly created by AI prompts is obvious. A similar effect can also be observed in other areas. Studies show that poems written by LLMs are indistinguishable from those written by humans and that generative AI products are often rated more highly 50. This can be explained by a trend towards the middle and the average, which can also be observed in the music and film scenes film scene: due to its basic function, GenAI cannot create anything fundamentally new, but replicates familiar patterns, which is precisely why it is so well received by the public. Ironically, ‘AI’ draws its ‘creativity’ from the content of those it seeks to replace. Much of this content was used as training material against the will of the rights holders. Whether this constitutes a copyright infringement has not yet been decided; morally, the situation seems clear. The creative community is the first to be seriously threatened by GenAI in its livelihood 51. It’s not a coincidence that a big part of GenAI efforts is targeted at “democratizing art”. This framing is completely upside down. Art has been one of the most democratic activities for a very long time. Everybody can do it; but not everybody wants to do put in the effort, the practicing time and the soul. Real art is not about the product but about the process, which requires real humans. Generating art without the friction is about getting rid of the humans in the loop - and still making money. Digital colonialismPermalink The huge amount of data required by hyperscaled AI approaches makes it impossible to completely curate the learning content. And yet, one would like to avoid the reproduction of racist, inhuman and criminal content. Attempts are being made to get the problem under control by subsequently adapting the models to human preferences and local laws through additional ‘reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)’ 52. The cheap labour for this very costly process can be found in the Global South. There, people are exposed to hours of hate speech, child abuse, domestic violence and other horrific scenarios in their poorly paid jobs in order to filter them out of the training material of large AI companies 53. Many emerge from these activities traumatised. However, it is not only people who are exploited in the less developed regions of the world, but also nature: the poisoning of the soil with chemicals during the extraction of raw materials for digital chips, as well as the contamination caused by our electronic waste and its improper disposal, are collateral damage that we willingly accept and whose long-term consequences are currently extremely difficult to assess. Here, too, the “developed” world profits, whereas the negative aspects are outsourced to the former colonies and other poor regions of the world. Political aspectsPermalink As software developers, we would like to ‘leave politics out of it’ and instead focus entirely on the cool tech. However, this is impossible when the advocates of this technology pursue strong political and ideological goals. In the case of GenAI, we can cleary see that the US corporations behind it (OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) have no problem with the current authoritarian – some say fascist – US government 54. In concrete terms, this means, among other things, that the models are explicitly manipulated to be less liberal or simply not to generate any output that could upset the CEO or the president 55. Even more serious is the fact that many of the leading minds behind these corporations and their financiers adhere to beliefs that can be broadly described as digital fascism. These include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Alex Karp, JD Vance, Elon Musk and many others on “The Authoritarian Stack” 56. Their ideologies, disguised as rational theories, are called longtermism and effective altruism. What they have in common is that they consider democracy and the state to be obsolete models, compassion to be ‘woke’, and that the current problems of humanity are insignificant, as our future lies in the colonisation of space and the merging of humans with artificial superintelligence 57. Do we want to give people who adhere to these ideologies (even) more power, money and influence by using and paying for their products? Do we want to feed their computer systems with our data? Do we really want to expose ourselves and our children to the answers from chatbots which they have manipulated? Not quite as abstruse, but similarly misanthropic, is the imminent displacement of many jobs by AI, as postulated by the same corporations in order to put pressure on employees with this claim. Demanding a large salary? Insisting on your legal rights? Complaining about too much workload? Doubts about the company’s goals? Then we’ll just replace you with cheap and uncomplaining AI! Whichever way you look at it, AI and GenAI are already being used politically. If we go along without resistance, we are endorsing this approach and supporting it with our time, our attention and our money. ConclusionPermalink Ideally, we would like to quantify our assessment by adding up the advantages, adding up the disadvantages and finally checking whether the balance is positive or negative. Unfortunately, in our specific case, neither the benefits nor the harm are easily quantifiable; we must therefore consult our social and personal values. Discussions about GenAI usually revolve purely around its benefits. Often, the capabilities of all ‘AI’ technologies (e.g. protein folding with AlphaFold 2) are lumped together, even though they have little in common with hyperscaling GenAI. However, if we consider the consequences and do not ignore the problems this technology entails – i.e. if we consider both sides in terms of ethics – the assessment changes. Convenience, speed and entertainment are then weighed against numerous damages and risks to the environment, the state and humanity. In this sense, the ethical use and further expansion of GenAI in its current form is not possible. Can there be ethical GenAI?Permalink If the use of GenAI is not ethical today what would have to change, which negative effects of GenAI would have to disappear or at least be greatly reduced in order to tip the balance between benefits and harms in the other direction? The models would have to be trained exclusively with publicly known content whose original creators consent to its use in training AI models. The environmental damage would have to be reduced to such an extent that it does not further fuel the climate crisis. Society would have to get full access to the training and operation of the models in order to rule out manipulation by third parties and restrict their use to beneficial purposes. This would require democratic processes, good regulation and oversight through judges and courts. The misuse and harming of others, e.g., through copyright theft or digital colonialism, would have to be prevented. Is such a change conceivable? Perhaps. Is it likely, given the interest groups and political aspects involved? Probably not

would take seriously the fact that intelligence is now being scaled and distributed through organizations long before it is unified or fully understood

Such a work would treat alignment as institutional design rather than a property of models alone.

Empirical grounding. In 2015, scaling laws, emergent capabilities, and deployment‑driven feedback loops were speculative. Today, they are measurable. That shift changes the nature of responsibility, governance, and urgency in ways that were difficult to justify rigorously at the time.

Political economy and power. The book largely brackets capital concentration, platform dynamics, and geopolitical competition. Today, these are central to any serious discussion of AI, not because the technology changed direction, but because it scaled fast enough to collide with real institutions and entrenched interests.

Alignment as an operational problem. The book assumes that sufficiently advanced intelligences would recognize the value of cooperation, pluralism, and shared goals. A decade of observing misaligned incentives in human institutions amplified by algorithmic systems makes it clear that this assumption requires far more rigorous treatment. Alignment is not a philosophical preference. It is an engineering, economic, and institutional problem.

what it feels like to live through an intelligence transition that does not arrive as a single rupture, but as a rolling transformation, unevenly distributed across institutions, regions, and social strata.

As a result, the debate shifted. The central question is no longer “Can we build this?” but “What does this do to power, incentives, legitimacy, and trust?”

The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop

Digital archaeology resists the (digital) neo-colonialism of Google, Facebook, and similar tech giants that typically promote disciplinary silos and closed code and data repositories.

very soon people will think that if you turn off their their their algorithm you're killing their pet,

‘The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists.

We are not concerned here with the question whether it would be desirableto have such a complete ethical code.

ora et labora

story of Separation

Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.

Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles

Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project This is a very substantial book which attempts to re-cast the nature and history of ethics as a form of "social technology", aimed at remedying "altruism failures", and generally moving humanity beyond the kind of social life endured by other primates — nasty, poor, and brutish, but not solitary. (Though he doesn't mention it, this is almost an inversion of Brecht's line "grub first, then ethics".) The guiding stars are Dewey (especially Human Nature and Conduct), John Stuart Mill (especially On Liberty and The Subjection of Women), and modern work on the evolution of cooperation. Kitcher builds from here to an examination of what counts as ethical progress, appropriate method and substance for meta-ethics, and appropriate method and recommendations for actual substantive ethics at the present day. The latter are strongly egalitarian, and not just founded on the "expanding circle" of empathy notion.

I think the Paleolithic ethical framework is simply—I mean, the hunter-gatherers—having no separation between themselves, no radical distinction between human and nonhuman—thought everything else was kindred. Literally, they thought if you went out to hunt and you’re hunting a deer, the deer is your sister or your brother, or maybe your ancestor, or maybe, more precisely, past/future forms of yourself. Because I think the ethic was you hunted with sort of prayers and sacrifice and humility. You’re asking a deer—a brother or a sister or an ancestor—to give its life for you.

in Vermont, Native Americans lived here—well, like everywhere in North America—they lived here in Vermont for over ten thousand years. The ecosystem was basically intact, and that’s because they had that ethical system built into their fundamental cultural assumptions—the assumptions that guided their lives. They didn’t think about them. They didn’t question them. They were simply the assumptions, the unthought assumptions.

We think of ourselves as this little bubble of obsessions and memories going on in our head that’s detached from everything else. That’s the wound.

I sort of trace out these parallel developments

The Greeks took that material change and they mythologized it into the soul. And then, of course, Genesis—the creation of the world in Christianity—says, the world is here for humans. It was created for humans to use, to dominate, to exploit, you know, in their trial here to see if they’re righteous or not.

But once you can write things down, then that mental realm suddenly starts looking timeless and radically different from the world around us. And I think that’s what really created this sense of an interior, what became, with the Greeks and the Christians, a kind of soul; this thing that’s actually made of different stuff. It’s made of spirit stuff instead of matter

next, I think, was writing

the sense we have now began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers started settling into Neolithic agricultural villages. And then at that point, there was a separate human space—it’s the village and the cultivated fields around it. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have that, they’re just wandering through “the wild,” “wilderness.” Of course, that idea would make no sense to them, because there’s no separation.

You describe how foundational stories of our Western, Christian paradigm are based on this idea of “a self-enclosed human realm separate from everything else,” and that this paradigm is a wound—one “so complete we can’t see it anymore, for it defines the very nature of what we assume ourselves to be.”

without disclosing it

gravitating away from the discourse of measuring and fixing unfair algorithmic systems, or making them more transparent, or accountable. Instead, I’m finding myself fixated on articulating the moral case for sabotaging, circumventing, and destroying “AI”, machine learning systems, and their surrounding political projects as valid responses to harm

Decolonizing AI is a multilayered endeavor, requiring a reaction against the philosophy of ‘universal computing’—an approach that is broad, universalistic, and often overrides the local. We must counteract this with varied and localized approaches, focusing on labor, ecological impact, bodies and embodiment, feminist frameworks of consent, and the inherent violence of the digital divide. This holistic thinking should connect the military use of AI-powered technologies with their seemingly innocent, everyday applications in apps and platforms. By exploring and unveiling the inner bond between these uses, we can understand how the normalization of day-to-day AI applications sometimes legitimizes more extreme and military employment of these technologies.There are normalized paths and routine ways to violence embedded in the very infrastructure of AI, such as the way prompts (text inputs, N.d.R.) are rendered into actual imagery. This process can contribute to dehumanizing people, making them legitimate targets by rendering them invisible.

In the meantime, we're all missing out on the benefits of (a) capturing images in wider gamuts today so we can view them in years to come, and (b) having systems and displays today that can be somewhere on the journey between the very limited sRGB/Rec709 standards of the previous century, and the inevitable landing spot of achieving full Rec2100 style displays everywhere into the future. Rejecting HDR now because we can only make it half way between the current spec and that goal misses the entire point of gradual improvement, and especially the benefit of capturing content today to view it on better displays in years to come.

CHINESE AMBASSADOR Exactly. But you have always taught us that liberty is the same thing as capitalism, as if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be crushed by greed. Your American dream is financial, not ethical.

face cream derived from human foreskin

Can model-free reinforcement learning explain deontological moraljudgments?Alisabeth AyarsUniversity of Arizona, Dept. of Psychology, Tucson, AZ, USA

Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineersadopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocraticoath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, evenat high personal cost.

The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit de-velopment of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting ourpursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

the canonical unit, the NCU supports natural capital accounting, currency source, calculating and accounting for ecosystem services, and influences how a variety of governance issues are resolved

it didn’t mention more recent work on how to make large language models more energy efficient and mitigate problems of bias.

Their ideas of possible action vary fromimportant-looking signed pronounce-ments and protests to the withholding ofservices and the refusal to assist in techni-cal developments that may be misap-plied.

I am even more attuned to creative rights. We can address algorithms of exploitation by establishing creative rights that uphold the four C’s: consent, compensation, control, and credit. Artists should be paid fairly for their valuable content and control whether or how their work is used from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

Foster international collaboration on PPDSA through promotion of partnerships and aninternational policy environment that furthers the development and adoption of PPDSAtechnologies and supports common values while protecting national and economic security

Elevate and promote foundational and use-inspired research through investments inmultidisciplinary research that will advance practical deployment of PPDSA approach andexploratory research to develop the next generation of PPDSA technologies.

Advance governance and responsible adoption through the establishment of a multi-partnersteering group to help develop and maintain a healthy PPDSA ecosystem, greater clarity on theuse of PPDSA technologies within the statutory and regulatory environments, and proactive riskmitigation measures.

PPDSA technologies will be created and used in a manner that stimulates responsible scientificresearch and innovation, and enables individuals and society to benefit equitably from the valuederived from data sharing and analytics

synthetic bioengineering provides a really astronomically large option space for new bodies and new minds that don't have 00:04:28 standard evolutionary backstories

Do you know if I'm real? An experiment to benchmark human recognition of AI-generated faces

One of the most common examples was in thefield of criminal justice, where recent revelations have shown that an algorithm used by the UnitedStates criminal justice system had falsely predicted future criminality among African-Americans attwice the rate as it predicted for white people

automated decisions

The idea that AI algorithms are free from biases is wrong since the assumptionthat the data injected into the models are unbiased is wrong

As the EU heads toward significant AI regulation, Altman recently suggested such regulation might force his company to pull out of Europe. The proposed EU regulation, of course, is focused on copyright protection, privacy rights, and suggests a ban on certain uses of AI, particularly in policing — all concerns of the present day. That reality turns out to be much harder for AI proponents to confront than some speculative future

In 2010, Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell wrote a book about tech innovation that described the way technologists fixate on the “proximate future” — a future that exists “just around the corner.” The authors, one a computer scientist, and the other a tech industry veteran, were examining emerging tech developments in “ubiquitous computing,” which promised that the sensors, mobile devices, and tiny computers embedded in our surroundings would lead to ease, efficiency, and general quality of life. Dourish and Bell argue that this future focus distracts us from the present while also absolving technologists of responsibility for the here and now.

“Diverse” is a passive adjective, while “inclusive” is an active one.

the Carthusian monks decided in 2019 to limit Chartreuse production to 1.6 million bottles per year, citing the environmental impacts of production, and the monks' desire to focus on solitude and prayer.[10] The combination of fixed production and increased demand has resulted in shortages of Chartreuse across the world.

must have an alignment property

study done this past December to get a sense of how possible this is: Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers" – Catherine Gao, et al. (2022)Blinded human reviewers were given a mix of real paper abstracts and ChatGPT-generated abstracts for submission to 5 of the highest-impact medical journals.

legal concepts

just than the State

In other words, the currently popular AI bots are ‘transparent’ intellectually and morally — they provide the “wisdom of crowds” of the humans whose data they were trained with, as well as the biases and dangers of human individuals and groups, including, among other things, a tendency to oversimplify, a tendency for groupthink, and a confirmation bias that resists novel and controversial explanations

In Vice, Maggie Puniewska points to the moral foundations theory, according to which liberals and conservatives prioritize different ethics: the former compassion, fairness and liberty, the latter purity, loyalty and obedience to authority.

But I also don’t think that a company that creates harmful technology should be excused simply because they’re bad at it.

How do we make them ‘‘benefit humanity as a whole’’ when humanity itself can’t agree on basic facts, much less core ethics and civic values?

‘‘So long as so-called A.I. systems are being built and deployed by the big tech companies without democratically governed regulation, they are going to primarily reflect the values of Silicon Valley,’’ Emily Bender argues, ‘‘and any attempt to ‘teach’ them otherwise can be nothing more than ethics washing.’’

For open educators, this runs counter to the very reason we use OER in the first place. Many open educators choose OER because there are legal permissions that allow for the ethical reuse of other people’s material — material the creators have generously and freely made available through the application of open licenses to it. The thought of using work that has not been freely gifted to the commons by the creator feels wrong for many open educators and is antithetical to the generosity inherent in the OER community.

“We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.”

In my most recent field (software), the engineer is placated with the delusion that the purpose is to give the customer what ey wants, whether that solves the customer’s problem or not. This is a lazy sort of self-imposed servitude that entirely avoids the actual purpose of engineering.

Students working together in a group trying to make meaning out of their own data could find themselves in a similar situation. Your lack of imagination about your own data may not result in a lack of imagination by others about what they think of you. Putting students in these situations without preparing them about assumptions they might make of others could lead to embarrassment and misunderstanding. 

Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the Garzweiler mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and utility company RWE argue the coal is needed to ensure Germany's energy security.Police officers use water cannons on protesters in Luetzerath on Saturday. (Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters)The regional and national governments, both of which include the environmentalist Green party, reached a deal with RWE last year allowing it to destroy the abandoned village in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038.Some speakers at Saturday's demonstration assailed the Greens, whose leaders argue that the deal fulfils many of the environmentalists' demands and saved five other villages from demolition.What on Earth?Why the reversal of a decades-old coal policy sparked controversy in Alberta"It's very weird to see the German government, including the Green party, make deals and compromise with companies like RWE, with fossil fuel companies, when they should rather be held accountable for all the damage and destruction they have caused," Thunberg said."My message to the German government is that they should stop what's happening here immediately, stop the destruction, and ensure climate justice for everyone."

"If you don’t know, you should just say you don’t know rather than make something up," says Stanford researcher Percy Liang, who spoke at a Stanford event Thursday.

For whom do we make knowledge and why? This question could not be timelier as humanists and administrators seek to make disciplines appear more relevant to students, applicable to social problems, and attendant to political, social, and economic exigencies” (2019, p. 351)

But we cannot have become social beings unless weassumed limitations on freedom of action in the struggle for exis-tence. Hence we must have become ethical before we becamerational.

it is now necessary to distinguish “virtue ethics” (the third approach) from “virtue theory”, a term which includes accounts of virtue within the other approaches.

Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them.

paper

humanity as not only the source and context for technology and its use, but its ultimate yardstick for the constructive use and impact of technology. This may sound obvious, it certainly does to me, but in practice it needs to be repeated to ensure it is used as such a yardstick from the very first design stage of any new technology.

The critical writing on data science hastaken the paradoxical position of in-sisting that normative issues pervadeall work with data while leaving unad-dressed the issue of data scientists’ethical agency. Critics need to consid-er how data scientists learn to thinkabout and handle these trade-offs,while practicing data scientists needto be more forthcoming about all ofthe small choices that shape their deci-sions and systems.