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In Defense of Useless Books

AI companies are running out of data. For chatbots to function well, they need to be trained on a tremendous amount of original data, and readily available (or easily stolen) data is close to being exhausted. One source of potential untapped content is old and out-of-print books that haven’t yet been digitized. And there has been speculation that AI companies have started to mine this resource: many outlets have reported that book sales at used bookstores and online resellers have seen a huge uptick, with some companies touting their ability to feed the AI beast fresh meat in the form of old books.

While there are still many good reasons to be concerned with the ways that AI companies deal with intellectual property, the problem with this new round of data acquisition concerns the fact that AI companies seem to not just be buying a ton of old books, but destroying them, as well. This destruction is for two reasons: first, scanning a book is easier if you tear off its spine; and second, destroying the book after scanning it is considered a transformative act under US copyright, and thus allows AI companies to skirt pesky intellectual property laws.

Reactions to news of large-scale book destruction have been almost entirely negative. Indeed, many booksellers have reported facing a dilemma: sell books that would otherwise go unsold to AI companies knowing that they will destroy them, or don’t sell them at all.

But what’s wrong with destroying old books, anyway? The thought of book destruction, of course, evokes images of mass book burnings, or the loss of great repositories of human knowledge like the Library of Alexandria. And it does seem that it would be a genuine loss if an AI company bought and destroyed a great artistic or scientific work, or even just a pretty good one.

But what about the books that aren’t winning any literary prizes or meaningfully advancing human knowledge? For example, a bookseller recently noted that he had been receiving a lot of orders for books that he really would have had almost no chance of selling: “stuff like The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 or How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991.” (For those not alive in the 90s, Corel WordPerfect was like Microsoft Word, but worse.) Arguably, neither of these books has any cultural significance, and while some Coloradoan might feel nostalgic while flipping through the guide to 1995 Metro Denver, it’s hard to see it getting any real use beyond that.

These are examples of useless books. That is not to say that there is no possible world in which they could be useful: we could construct some far-fetched scenario where, in a post-apocalyptic world, we need to relearn word processing from scratch, or where we are invaded by aliens who demand we tell them the hottest Denver restaurants of 1995 or be destroyed. But for all practical purposes, no one today is going to get much use out of these books. AI companies can, on the other hand, make use of useless books: all data is good data for a large language model so long as it is novel. So maybe there is one use for useless books after all, and if they need to be destroyed in the process, then it’s really no big loss.

Should we rethink our reactions to the destruction of old books, taking comfort in the knowledge that they can slightly increase the valuation of whatever company chooses to destroy them? I think the answer is: “no.” Useless books are worth saving not because they’re useful, but because destroying them is vicious.

A couple of clarifications. First, the kind of destruction we’re talking about is really more of an annihilation: the trend in sales of used books involves books that are uncommon or rare, such that there is a real possibility that a destroyed book will be the last of its kind. This kind of destruction seems much more egregious than, say, a library or bookstore discarding copies of pulp fiction because very few people want to read them (although we still might balk at the thought of those books being de-spined).

Second, when we talk about an act being “vicious,” we typically do so in a moral sense. But we can also speak of acting in an epistemically vicious way. Just as a moral vice is a kind of trait that leads people to do morally bad things or obstruct the actions of the morally good and just, epistemic vices are those that intentionally obstruct the acquisition or sharing of knowledge. For example, being extremely close-minded is a vice because it prevents you from acquiring new knowledge and ensuring that the beliefs you have are, in fact, true. More overt, physical acts can also be the expression of epistemic vices, such as banning books for overly prudish or dogmatic reasons, sowing distrust in experts on the basis of ideological differences, and, of course, destroying books.

The destruction of an uncommon or rare book is vicious, then, because such destruction prevents the knowledge contained in that book from being accessed by anyone else. When it comes to useless books, the usefulness is moot: How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991 still contains information that can be known, and so by purposefully destroying one of the few remaining copies, AI companies are preventing others from acquiring that knowledge.

Might we think, though, that in using the content of old books, AI companies preserve the information they contain by using them to train their LLMs? After all, after feeding all those delicious tokens contained in an old book into the insatiable maw of an LLM, a user may then be able to better get information about outdated word processing programs or, at the very least, have better conversations with their chatbots.

However, even if an LLM does end up preserving esoteric knowledge through the destruction of old books, this is incidental to their main goal, which is to acquire more information about the statistical relationships between parts of words. It would be like saying that in using a copy of The Bell Jar to wallpaper my living room, I am preserving a great work of literature because you could, technically, still read it if you came over to visit: I wanted the book for the paper it was printed on, not for the work itself.

There is also reason to think that AI companies are acting in other epistemically vicious ways that go beyond the physical destruction of books. As Alex Reisner at The Atlantic argues, using books to train LLMs “masks the hard work and collaboration that goes into knowledge creation, undermines incentives for authors to write books, prevents experts from finding one another, and gives AI companies tremendous power over what information people can access.” These are consequences that occur regardless of the usefulness of the books involved: the destruction of The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 is vicious not necessarily because of the potential loss of knowledge about Denver from over 30 years ago, but because it is an intentional act that undermines knowledge creation and sharing.

So, what should we do with all those old, useless books, gathering dust in used bookstores? Bookstore owners might still have other, practical reasons to sell their books to AI companies, even at the cost of feeding an epistemic vice. This is, perhaps, why bookstore owners are so conflicted: when practical and epistemic values conflict, it’s not always easy to determine how to determine the right course of action. But those acting most viciously are clearly the AI companies: destroying uncommon books for the sake of training LLMs has practical benefits to the company at the cost of knowledge for everyone else. While few will likely lament the unavailability of useless books, destroying them still comes at a cost.

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Let’s Get Critical: Part II

In Part I, I offered a reasonable definition of critical thinking. If we accept this as a good starting place, we can proceed to the next question I asked: why should we want to develop the ability to think this way in the first place?

We can take a page out of Aristotle’s book (specifically this one), and assume the value will be intrinsic, instrumental, or both. If the value of critical thinking is intrinsic, then something about this skill is good all on its own, even if it gets us nothing beyond the ability to exercise it. If the value of this skill is instrumental, it is good because of something else that it allows us to do or get. If both, then it is a combination of these two.

I think there is a case to be made for the combination answer: that this skill is good because it helps lead us to other desirable ends, and also because, even if it did not, there is something worthy in being able to exercise this human skill (perhaps it is aesthetically valuable). However, I will primarily focus on explaining what I take to be some of the most compelling, instrumentally valuable elements of knowing how to analyze, conceptualize, and problematize using the power of one’s own mind.

Doing the Right Thing

As I have been investigating this skill, I have continually named it as critical thought, though we could also call it by another name: rationality. I will not pick apart the differences between these two here, as I am assuming there is enough overlap between them to make the point.

Immanuel Kant asked a similar question in his famous work, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. He wanted to know what, if anything, rationality was for. He points out that it could be for ensuring our survival, though it is clear that plants and many animals survive just fine without it, so this is unlikely to be exclusively for this purpose. He also suggests that it could be used in service of providing us with a happy life, but this he also dismisses. He argues that many of us might actually be happier if we were slightly less rational; he may be onto something here, though I will try to offer some reasons why critical thinking may be useful for this as well. In the end, Kant decides the ultimate function of rationality is to discern right from wrong; i.e., rationality is for morality.

If Kant is right about this and the similarities between critical thinking and rational thinking hold, we have our first answer. Developing the skill is, for Kant at least, necessary for knowing right from wrong (indeed, Kant thought rationality and moral action were identical). Whether it actually makes us act rightly is another question, but if you have even the slightest inclination to do the right thing, then you should want to practice careful, critical thinking.

Living a Good Life

Many of us want things out of life. We want to live a good life, a happy life, a fulfilled life. We want to pursue a large variety of ends: we want careers, we want to secure a pleasant retirement, we want to have romantic partners, build families, have friends, pursue pleasant and interesting activities, help others, fight for what is right, and ultimately live out some version of the good life.

Unfortunately, none of this is given to us. We must exert effort in our lives to create this reality for ourselves. A good life doesn’t just happen; one must cultivate it. This is a long-standing realization within the philosophical community, and we have been trying to figure out just how to do so since we started writing our thoughts down. One thing that many of us hope is that the careful cultivation of our cognitive capacities may be helpful toward achieving a good life.

To see clearly where the skill of careful thought may be of use in living a good life, we can imagine the opposite case: someone who does not exercise this capacity. The quintessentially thoughtless person lets the world decide for them, perhaps their parents, their friends, or their society. So, they engage in recreation that others have decided is fun, they get a degree that others decided was right for them, they get a job in a field that others decided would be lucrative or fulfilling for them, they vote for politicians that others have praised, they support causes that others have set up as worth fighting for, and in general, they do not stop to ask what they think about all of these choices. This person may find themselves very quickly in the middle of a midlife crisis and they may ask themselves, “well, how did I get here?”

This is not to undermine the importance of social and communal life; there is great value in liking what others like and making choices that are prosocial. Rather, it is to point out that the risk of thoughtlessness is the risk of losing one’s sense of agency and the ability to engage meaningfully in the cultivation of one’s own life.

Being an Informed Citizen

Without getting into the why of it all, we can take as a given that all of us are born into and must navigate political society. Here is where the skill of analytical and critical thinking can be seen as worth developing for oneself.

As I have argued elsewhere, most political ideologies must confront the question of violence. While it is true that a great deal of our sociopolitical life is mundane — filling out forms, standing in line, paying taxes — it rests on a delicate and risky foundation because political power entails the power to control others with coercion. Even the most moderately informed person knows that the history of the world is filled with serious stakes, and it requires a massive collective effort to create conditions of peace and justice.

Enter the skill we have been analyzing. In order to know what kind of society you are in — is it a just or unjust society, and what should be done about it either way? — you need to be able to think for yourself. So, we can return now to our imaginary opponent from part I, the AI extremist, who asks us to let go of the hard work of critical analysis. Why should we hold on to this ancient human art form when the bots are now able to produce analytical and critical analysis for us? Why can we not just ask the bots, for instance, “Is my society just?”

In order to understand why we would never want to let go of this skill, we need to acknowledge that justice exists on a spectrum. No society is perfectly just and even if one could imagine maximizing justice in one’s social order, human fallibility all but ensures that justice will fluctuate. Justice is ultimately an ongoing, never ending project.

Acknowledging the imperfect nature of human societies implies something else, namely that the systems we create and deploy will also fluctuate on the spectrum of justice. AI systems are particularly susceptible to these fluctuations for a few reasons: (1) they are being integrated into information systems used by billions of people, (2) they are being integrated into various levels of society’s basic structure and government, and (3) we so far do not have a way to perfectly prevent AI from lying, making mistakes, being manipulated, or going rogue.

With these points in mind, we can ask whether it is prudent to give up our rational powers and defer to the answers and reasons offered by an AI system. If you ask the AI “Is our society just?” and it says yes, you can also ask it why it thinks so. It may offer a seemingly sophisticated set of justifications that might satisfy you and these justifications may even be good ones. But, given the fragility of justice, without a way for you to personally assess the answers and reasons given by an AI system you are vulnerable to a serious political threat. Alan Moore articulates this problem well in Watchmen with the graffitied protest slogan “Who watches the Watchmen?”

On the matter of being an informed citizen, it is only in the most utopic society where one might even consider abandoning the power of their mind. But in most of the realities we can imagine, this skill is of the utmost importance if one values things like truth, freedom, and justice.

While this list of reasons is also incomplete, we now have a partial answer to our second question and we can more confidently say why we must hold fast against any forces that threaten to take this most human of skills away from us, lest we fall into an inhuman slumber.

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Let’s Get Critical: Part I

Long before a gaggle of chatbots began to creep in on academia’s professional turf, humanities professors have been extolling the virtues of learning the humanities because it teaches, among other things, the skill of critical thinking.

Now that AI is being advertised to students as a study aid, private tutor, or (unabashedly) a way to cheat on everything, we are all frantically trying to figure out what it is we can offer students. The answer? Critical thinking. It’s always been a part of our sales pitch, but now with renewed vigor.

We can split the claim that AI is unhelpful for critical thinking into two parts. First, while AI can provide all kinds of output, it cannot think critically for us. If you want to turn in an assignment, or create a presentation for your new boss, AI can do that for you; if you want to create critical thoughts in your own mind, it cannot. Second, AI will always be biased, either because its training data is biased, or because its output must always be aligned with the business aims of the companies that create it.

Of course, we can challenge both of these claims. First, while AI cannot think critically for us, there are plenty of clever ways to engage with it to practice critical thinking. For instance, you can write an argument, feed the argument to AI, and then ask it to critique your argument. You can then edit your writing and repeat the process. For the truly curious, AI chatbots can be intellectual sparring companions. Second, while AI output must in some way be aligned with the values of the company that creates the system, maybe it can still produce some kind of critical output. Just ask Claude to critically analyze its last response and it will produce something that, at least on the surface, looks critical.

All this attention on critical thinking and AI’s potential impact on it has got me thinking. What precisely is critical thinking? And what’s it good for anyway? In this two-part series, I will offer an answer to both of these questions. Let’s start with the first question.

Critical thinking is a skill.

This claim is central to the rest of my analysis. By labeling critical thinking a skill, I do not mean to say it is only a skill; for instance, it may also be a natural ability, something that some people can engage in more naturally than others. All I mean here by claiming that it is a skill is that it can be improved with practice. Furthermore, it seems to be like other skills in that you can lose proficiency if you stop practicing. This is one of the great fears that the AI boom has ushered in; if the bots are thinking for us, our minds might atrophy and we might lose crucial skills like the ability to hold those in positions of power accountable.

Critical thinking is a kind of optimistic thinking.

I do not want to make the claim that all critical thinking is inherently optimistic. Some people who practice critical thinking are genuinely pessimistic. However, when I think about my own use of critical thinking, I spend most of my critical energy thinking about what is wrong with systems that are genuinely important for humanity, e.g., systems of government and informational technologies. I do this not because I enjoy noticing the horrors of our collective social life, but because I think it is possible to imagine a better way forward.

Being critical is, when done well, a hopeful practice. It takes some effort to remember this because being critical is often depressing; it requires spending a lot of time analyzing something and noticing all of the problems it has. This is both emotionally and intellectually draining and can leave you wondering: what is the point of doing anything? But if you keep an optimistic wind in your sails, the skill of critical thinking can be a positive force.

Critical thinking is a macro-skill.

Critical thinking is the culmination of several other skills working together. While likely incomplete, here is a short list of the sub-skills involved:

Sustained attention. In order to be critical about something — an idea, an argument, an action, a person, a company, a state, a religion — you need to be able to focus on it. You need to be able to witness it long enough to understand what, if anything, is criticizable about it. Without sustained attention, you cannot be critical.

Suspension of judgment. Neil Postman articulates this point nicely in Amusing Ourselves to Death when he talks about the skills required for reading. In order to read well, you need to be able to wait on drawing a final conclusion until you finish the written work. This is true of being critical as well (a point that Postman is perfectly well aware of). When I am being critical of something, I need to take in enough of whatever it is I am being critical of before issuing my judgment.

Clear articulation. Good critical thought needs to be clearly articulated, at the very least to yourself, but insofar as you want your criticism to reach an audience, then to others as well. Whether written or spoken or by some other means, one needs to think about the delivery of their criticism so that it is understood and appreciated by its audience.

Justification. Good criticism ought to be justified criticism. There should be a connection between the criticism, e.g., the choice to enter the war was unconstitutional, and the justification, e.g., the Constitution states that congressional approval is required for war. Understanding whether a criticism is justified requires a lot of thought and effort. You need to think about what kinds of reasons count as good reasons, not just for you but for your audience as well.

Imagination. One of the cornerstones of good criticism is imagination. You need to turn the object of potential criticism around, over and over again, to find the cracks. It often requires wandering down strange corridors of the mind to discover a critical point about something.

These sub-skills each require practice, which makes the art of critical thinking a challenging skill to master. As you practice, you may find some components easier to develop than others.

Critical thinking poses a question.

Finally, behind the act of thinking critically we will always find a question. For instance, when the state passes a law, the critical mind awakens. Who does this law benefit? Who does it harm? Who wrote this law and for what purpose? What lobbyists were involved? What are the intended consequences of this law? Are those intended consequences just? What are the unintended consequences of this law? Are those likely? Are they desirable? Was the process through which the law was written and passed fair? What standard of fairness are we using? Is that measure a good one? Will this law be easy to repeal if we learn the consequences are deleterious to social harmony? Did we need this law at all? Could we solve the problem without getting the government involved? And so the list of questions goes on.

Critical thinking involves answering critical questions. While the content of these questions is as diverse as the topics about which we can be critical, the basic questions that sit beneath them are simply: What is wrong with this thing? What could be improved?

It is easy for the critical mind to become weary and get lost in a sea of possible questions. It is also worth noting that while we can probably be critical of everything if we want, not everything needs to be criticized. If you find yourself outside, enjoying a sea breeze, it may not be the time or place for the critical mind. Asking the question what is wrong or what could be improved misses the point of enjoying a sea breeze. Sometimes the right thing to do is just to be.

This brings us to the fact that this is a skill that needs to be practiced and cultivated with care. Having good mentors helps, but in the end one often needs to work out for themselves how to get their own mind in the critical spirit at the right time and place and in the right way. This takes lots of practice and a lot of trial and error.

While this is an incomplete account of what the skill of critical thinking is, I think it is a reasonable starting place. But this only answers the first question. What about the second? What is the value of this skill anyway? What do we say to the skeptic, who thinks the critical spirit is a waste of time? Now that the AI revolution is upon us, they say, just relax and ask your personalized AI assistant what to think. Why should you want to know how to do this for yourself? I will offer an answer to this in Part II.

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Is AI Responsible for Misleading Us?

A recent court case in Germany found Google liable for false statements that were generated by its AI overview. Two publishers discovered that when users searched the names of their companies, Google’s AI presented information confidently stating the companies were scams with a history of fraud (which they weren’t). Google, while losing the case, did not go down without a fight (and is already planning to appeal the decision). In their defense, they argued that the warning at the bottom of their search results – which reads, at the time of writing, “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses” – is sufficient to free them from any liability related to anything in the AI summary itself. According to the company, those who rely on Google’s AI summaries should know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” and therefore it is the responsibility of users, not Google, to ensure that what they are reading is true.

This argument did not fly in court. But Google’s defense underscores the sometimes-contradictory ways tech companies have attempted to avoid accountability when it comes to the creations of their chatbots. Specifically, tech companies will selectively argue that their AIs are or are not responsible for their outputs, depending on what best suits their needs.

Whether Google should be held responsible for its AI’s behavior, despite providing a warning that it could be providing users with false information, depends in part on how we conceive of the chatbot itself. Consider an example: let’s say I ask my friend for directions to a restaurant he’s recommended (also say the restaurant is brand new and so doesn’t show up on Google Maps yet). He confidently gives me the directions, but adds a caveat: “I’m only human, and none of us are perfect.” Not taking too much heed of his odd remark, I start on my way and quickly find myself lost: it turns out my friend’s directions were completely wrong. When I ask him what happened, he replies that he’s not responsible for my mistake and that I should have double-checked. After all, I really should know better than to blindly trust other people, and he did remind me he can be wrong sometimes.

It seems my friend cannot get off the hook so easily: he told me something that turned out to be false, and for that, he at least owes me an apology (and maybe dinner). Merely reminding someone that there’s always a chance that we could be wrong doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility: if we were really that concerned about saying something false, then we’d either have to retract a statement if we made it or not make it at all.

Of course, this is the kind of responsibility that people have, and AIs are not people. People have agency, and thus can make intentional choices about what they say. But an AI is different. Indeed, Google argued in the German court that their AI merely conveys information that other people have written. In this way, Google argued that its chatbot should be held to the same standards as your run-of-the-mill search engine: since Google search results just present links to stuff that other people have made, Google is not responsible for what shows up in its results (by and large). Similarly, Google argued that in virtue of their AI presenting other people’s content and not its own, they bear no responsibility for it.

As we’ve seen, this argument did not save Google’s case in the German court. One reason the court ruled against Google is that the AI summary hallucinated new information that could only be attributed to the program itself, and thus the responsibility for the defamatory content it presented fell to Google. However, Google’s overall strategy was as follows: argue that its AI should not be compared to the kinds of things that are responsible for their outputs. In many other cases, however, tech companies have argued the exact opposite to try to get out of trouble.

The case in Germany is by no means the first time tech companies have gotten into hot water for their chatbots causing harm to users. For example, in 2025, a court case in the US was brought against tech company Character Technologies when its AI was alleged to have played a large part in a teen’s suicide. In response, the company argued they should not be held liable since their chatbot’s outputs constituted free speech. This argument was rejected by the court on the basis that chatbots don’t produce “speech” – they merely present the outcomes of algorithms – and thus could not benefit from the protections of free speech.

The strategy that Character Technologies took, however, was the opposite of Google’s, arguing that the AI program should be treated in the same way as things that are responsible for their outputs so that they are granted the rights that accompany those responsibilities. While this would not save the company from any moral responsibility, possessing the right of free speech could potentially save them from legal liability.

A similar argument can also be found in ongoing lawsuits concerning the use of copyrighted material to train AI models. As I’ve written about here, some tech companies have argued that training large language models using copyrighted materials is “fair use,” given that using such works in this way is “transformative,” and that training an AI model is akin to the ways that human beings learn and produce new content. Since there’s nothing wrong with a person reading a lot of copyrighted books and then producing new content on the basis of what they have read, so goes the argument, then neither should there be any problems with an AI doing the same thing.

This argument has again been rejected by courts (at least thus far): while a person has the capacities to learn, be creative, and produce something new, and thus also has the responsibility to use content fairly, a computer program that produces content on the basis of algorithms does not have any of these capacities or responsibilities and so lacks any accompanying rights.

Tech companies, then, face a dilemma when trying to skirt moral and legal responsibilities when their chatbots produce false, harmful, or defamatory content: either they are treated like things that can be responsible for their actions, or they are not. If the former, then perhaps they should be granted certain rights, but then they cannot simply be treated as programs that reproduce the content of others, and so their creators must bear responsibility for their content. If the latter, then a case could be made that the responsibility for the content they produce should fall to the original creators of that content that they are reproducing, but then the tech companies must admit that they are, in fact, not using other people’s creations in a fair or transformative way, and so bear responsibilities towards those creators (namely, to pay them).

While there are many court cases around AI that still need to be resolved, appealed, re-appealed, and so on, it seems that no matter what, tech companies cannot completely avoid liability when it comes to content their chatbots create.

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The AI Crisis and The Unexamined Life

One question that I return to over and over again is this: What am I doing? Beneath this question are more questions. What do I want to do? What should I do? What can I do? Is any of this worth doing? Does what I want matter, or should I do what others want me to do? What needs to be done?

This line of questioning takes us back to the Apology of Socrates. As Socrates is pleading his case to the court about whether or not he is guilty of the charges brought against him (corrupting the youth, claiming to be wise about that which he isn’t, teaching new gods in place of the old ones), he says the following:

And on the other hand, if I say that this even happens to be a very great good for a human being–to make speeches every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me conversing and examining both myself and others–and that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be persuaded by me still less when I say these things. This is the way it is, as I affirm, men; but to persuade you is not easy.

From this the familiar philosophical dictum arises: the unexamined life is not worth living.

While this slogan has stuck with me from the earliest days of my philosophical career, I find myself thinking about it more than usual these days as we continue to barrel through the AI Crisis. This is because AI is encroaching on uniquely human activities; whether real or mimicry, AI emulates thought, rationality, creativity, and agency to such a degree that we can outsource a great deal of our lives to it.

The AI Crisis is unfolding each day and its magnitude as a crisis is currently unclear. There are several components to the crisis, each of which is being debated and analyzed by scholars, technology experts, users, and everyone in between. We can call it a crisis because its scale of influence is global, its potential impacts are wide ranging, some of the worst-case scenarios are plausible, and the spheres of impact have serious stakes.

While the list below is incomplete, we can currently identify four major components of the AI Crisis.

The first component of the crisis is job displacement.

One of AI’s most marketed value propositions is that it can simulate the function and output of intelligence and that this is good for business. If AI can do this with any modicum of success, it threatens virtually any job that requires human intelligence.

Within the debate about AI is a question about the label “intelligence.” AI evangelists are quite serious about the term and many think AI really is intelligent, and if it is not now intelligent, it eventually will be. AI skeptics lament the term and argue that AI intelligence is an illusion and that any modicum of intelligence we can ascribe to AI really ought to be credited to the human labor powering AI and making it run smoothly.

At least for immediate job displacement, whether the intelligence is real or a façade is somewhat irrelevant. All that is required for the threat of job displacement to actualize is that people believe AI is intelligent. If they believe it to be the case, then this is enough to get the ball rolling on finding reasons to remove human workers from the loop. Right now, experts are mixed on whether or not AI is contributing to job displacement, but there is concern that it is inevitable.

Whether AI is able to live up to its labor-replacing hype will determine its long-term viability as a worker replacement. But even if it falls short of its promised performance, we should not underestimate the possibility that society will accept less than ideal labor if it saves someone money.

The second component of the AI crisis is wealth distribution.

The promise of AI is centered around doing more with less. There is a race to figure out precisely how to use AI so that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish with less people, less resources, and less ability. Whoever cracks the code first stands to gain an enormous amount of wealth, and this is something we are already seeing unfold. It is a capitalist dream to have a labor force that does not need to be paid wages, given sick leave or vacation, or provided breaks – there are no human needs to take their attention away from work.

The third component is about political domination.

AI systems cannot be separated from our political reality. AI systems are becoming intertwined in our social infrastructure at a multitude of levels. It is infused in our word processing and data processing software, our search engines and our emails, into our phones and computers. By virtue of being bound up in our information and communication technologies, it will inevitably shape what we see, what we know, how we talk, and how we think. AI is being used by the military, by police force, and by immigration enforcement. It is used by lawmakers and the courts. And, as every educator knows, it is being used by our students who are quite literally the future.

If AI were politically and morally neutral, this would be less alarming; but AI is not politically and morally neutral. It must be given values and red lines; it must be told what it is allowed to say and what it isn’t allowed to say. And, as is well established by now, the data that it relies on itself contains an immense amount of bias and morally coded information. Insofar as AI is generating profit, all of its operations must also somehow conform with the endeavor to do so.

I am not using the term domination flippantly. By domination, I am drawing from the work of Philip Pettit who identifies domination as a kind of arbitrary power that one has over another in the sphere of interpersonal relationships.

One way AI political domination occurs is through AI ownership. Insofar as a small handful of AI systems dominate the information and communication sphere, our way of understanding our political reality will be shaped by those who control and shape these AI systems. Another way is more diffuse and arises as a result of the sprawling and unpredictable nature of AI systems. Insofar as AI systems may not be fully intelligible or controllable by its makers or those who seek to control and regulate these systems, we will be dominated by an AI infused informational reality where all of us are subjected to the interpretations and nudges of AI systems.

The fourth component of the AI crisis is about responsibility.

AI threatens responsibility at several levels. First, AI will make it more difficult to track causal responsibility, which is simply the tracing of who or what is responsible for bringing about a particular state of affairs (something that is already remarkably difficult without considering the role of AI).

When AI is involved in a decision-making procedure and a mistake is made, AI muddies the causal waters in a particularly confusing way because it mimics agency. When someone is wrongly identified by AI as a wanted person, it is clear that AI is in part causally responsible. But so are the people who designed the AI system, the people in charge of updating the code that runs the AI, and the officers who used the system to make the arrest in the first place. The problem we face will only grow as AI continues to be embedded into our social structures.

Second, we lose track of moral responsibility. When an AI agent is involved in a decision-making procedure and something goes off the rails morally, it is not clear cut where we can place the moral blame. While the human in the loop strategy attempts to eliminate this moral ambiguity, the implementation of this strategy has serious limits. If the use of AI becomes standard practice, and AI is deemed as generally trustworthy, and a morally condemnable act happens as a result of the use of AI, it’s hard to understand how we can blame the human in the loop when they were trusting the system they have been socially conditioned to trust.

Third, we lose track of merit responsibility. What I have in mind by merit is simply the responsibility we give people for doing good acts and producing interesting or praiseworthy things in the world. This applies to artists and athletes as much as it does to the romantic partner or friend, or the hardworking employee and studious student. When the musician who studied music theory and put countless hours into practicing their instrument records tens or hundreds of takes, and meticulously mixes the final product, it is clear who deserves the praise and merit for creating music. When someone with an idea for a song uses AI to produce all the instrumentation, refine the lyrics, and structure the melody and pacing of the song with all of its varying sections, and ensures all the instruments are in the right key, the placement of merit is less clear. For what, if anything, is the prompt engineer praiseworthy for?

Back to the Examined Life

One of the unifying features of these components is that the AI crisis is ultimately an existential one. As I ponder the AI crisis, I am led back to some of the most basic philosophical questions: What are we doing here, what kind of lives do we want to live, how should we spend our time, what kind of world do we want to build for ourselves and each other?

Instead of waiting to see where the AI dust settles and just how far the crisis will go, we can insulate ourselves now by remembering the wisdom of Socrates. AI is wrapped up in human activity and how we spend our time. It is wrapped up in questions of morality and virtue and responsibility and meaning. It is bound up in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is one not worth living.

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Claude vs. The Pentagon: How Much Should Being Ethical Cost?

Until recently, Anthropic AI’s Large Language Model “Claude” was one of the most widely used in the US military. This status was tested in February when Anthropic refused to allow the military to use Claude for autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic has always defined itself as being ethics and AI safety conscious. This time, standing their ground cost them. The Pentagon responded by labeling Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” endangering Claude’s existing contracts with the Department of Defense and other defense contractors. Anthropic asserted this was mere retaliation — no US-based company has ever been labelled a supply chain risk — and sought a legal order to halt the designation. A previous judgment affirmed this stance. However, in bad news for Anthropic, a panel of the DC Circuit Court recently declined to stop the supply chain risk designation while the dispute continues.

The ethical choice is not always the easy choice. People have lost money, jobs, and even their lives to maintain their principles. Anthropic, while their conviction is laudable, is perhaps not the ultimate example of ethical sacrifice. Part of the reason Claude had so much presence in the military is their partnership with Palantir, a major player behind AI-facilitated surveillance. Moreover, as a multi-billion dollar company, Anthropic is able to far better weather the consequences of saying no to the US military than most.

Nonetheless, it invites the more general question: What price should we be willing to pay to do the right thing?

The answer is often surprisingly high. Many philosophers consider ethics to have an “overriding“ character. Not only is ethics a reason for action (or to withhold from action), but it is the most important reason, overriding all non-ethical ones. There might be competing moral reasons: While I know stealing is wrong, if I don‘t steal, then I can‘t feed my family. Contrast this with an unjustified alternative: Stealing is wrong unless one finds a legal loophole.

Central to most ethical approaches are that other lives matter. This is true for Immanuel Kant, who stressed that we must treat each other as fellow rational beings with their own ends, and not merely as means for our ends. It is equally true for many consequence-based frameworks (those that evaluate moral conduct based on what has the best consequences), which value all wellbeing equally.

The combination of overridingness and concern for others, means that being ethical can be quite demanding. However, there is a reason we are impressed by those who stand by their principles in the face of threats and intimidation. Take for instance the German families that hid Jewish children. It is not easy. We value our lives, we value our stuff. Even in less extreme cases, being ethical can be challenging. Confronting a close friend about their drug use may damage the friendship, but it may nonetheless be the right thing to do as a true friend.

In practice, if we care about ethical behavior, it is in our interest to make behaving ethically as convenient as possible. Nations have practical reasons to prevent the harmful effects of stealing, violence, and corruption. We, in fact, expect a well-run society to stop such things. One thing the law can do is align incentives, such that right conduct is favored and wrong conduct punished. Of course, we may prefer people not to steal because it’s unethical, and not because it’s against the law, but you can’t always get what you want.

This relates to an effective system of justice and accountability, but also to the opportunity cost of ethical behavior. Consider two vastly different stories we can tell about cheating. In both cases, cheating to get ahead is morally wrong. In the first story, one is also very likely to get caught and punished, negating any benefit of cheating. In the second, punishment is unlikely, and those who don’t cheat should be prepared to fall behind those who do. In fact, they should probably expect one of those cheaters to be their boss.

Sometimes, sacrifice is required; it may take courage to do the right thing. But what does it mean if sacrifice is required over, and over, and over again? What does it mean if being ethical looks like a fool’s game, a way to set oneself up for nothing but struggle and failure? It doesn’t mean people should stop being ethical. It is, however, an indication the incentive structure of the society is badly misaligned.

Whatever one thinks about the specific ethics of Anthropic, the DC Circuit Panel had an opportunity to signal that if one stands by their principles, the law will protect them from retaliation. They chose not to. What message does this send to those of us who are not billion dollar companies?

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Dodging Blame: Iran, AI, and International Law

On Saturday, February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a new military campaign against Iran. The campaign has consisted of a series of air strikes against Iran, the first wave of which killed numerous Iranian officials, including the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Kahmenei. In subsequent days, Iran launched attacks against Israel and U.S.-aligned Gulf states in the region, as the U.S. and Israel continued their campaign.

The U.S. has not been transparent in providing its motivating reasons. Reasons cited to justify the campaign include (but may not be limited to) (discredited) claims that this was a preemptive strike to thwart an imminent Iranian attack, that the attacks are meant to prompt regime change in Iran (which the National Intelligence Council concluded was unlikely), and that the bombings are meant to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, even though the White House claimed it “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in June 2025.

By the time this column is published, the situation will have almost certainly evolved. Despite President Donald Trump’s comments that the conflict is “very complete, pretty much” and that the U.S. and Israel have “already won in many ways,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, on March 10th declared that this would be the U.S.’ most intense day of strikes against Iran yet. Intelligence now suggests that Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and striking oil tankers traversing the strait, creating the potential for catastrophic ripple effects on the global economy; between 20 and 30% of the world’s crude oil supply is shipped through this waterway.

Rather than discussing the broad details, I want to focus on a particular incident in this conflict and its moral ramifications. In the initial wave of strikes against Iran, a missile struck an all-girls elementary school outside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. Iranian officials claim that the attack killed 168 people, about 110 of whom were children. Investigations have revealed that a Tomahawk missile struck the school. Tomahawks, manufactured by Raytheon, have only been sold to the governments of the U.S., Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and the Netherlands. Thus, it appears that the U.S. struck the school.

If the U.S. military knowingly targeted the school then this, by violating international humanitarian law, is almost certainly a war crime. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the U.S. is signatory, prohibits any intentional attacks on civilians. Even if a school is on a military base, the children (and likely most of the staff) are civilians – I personally was a student at such a school. Yet some sources in the intelligence community suggest that the school was struck due to outdated intelligence. So this may have been unintentional.

But even tragic accidents may be the product of negligence, and thus blameworthy. It is worth noting that new military leadership in the U.S. appears critical of restraint and oversight. Hegseth has repeatedly emphasized lethality as the “calling card” of the U.S. military. Offices responsible for preventing and investigating civilian casualties have been gutted during his tenure. While criticizing allies who are “hemming and hawing about the use of force,” he emphasized that U.S. military actions in Iran will have “no stupid rules of engagement.” In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, he declared that the only people who should be worried about the conflict are “Iranians that think they’re gonna live,” although he went on to state that the U.S. military does not target civilians. Thus, there is reason to believe that even if accidental, the strike may have been the result of the willful dismantling of protective measures.

This occurs against a backdrop of increasing AI use in military operations. Reportedly, the U.S. is utilizing AI systems from Palantir in order to select targets for the strikes. If true, you can imagine the bombing of the elementary school to have plausibly progressed as follows. (Admittedly, this is speculation on my part – do not take this as a report.) Perhaps a program designed to identify potential military targets presented the building containing the school as such, due to faulty intelligence. The targets were then insufficiently vetted against current intelligence, leading to a missile strike against an elementary school. Multiple small errors compounding into tragedy. Due to the number of errors, it may be difficult to determine who is responsible for this specific incident.

This links to what just war theorists refer to as the accountability gap. Commonly discussed in the context of autonomous weapon systems, the accountability gap emerges when it is unclear who is responsible for a particular outcome. This accountability gap emerges because activated autonomous weapons systems select and strike against targets without human input. Even when such a machine makes a grave error, it is unclear who is responsible; there’s no specific person who chose this.

The bombing of the Iranian elementary school did not involve an autonomous weapon system. Yet a gap is not a binary – a gap can be large or small. The introduction of nonhuman decision makers introduces an accountability gap. In this case, the use of AI systems to present potential strike targets.

So, upon whom should responsibility fall for striking the school fall? One answer may be those who approved the strike. AI systems are “black box” technology – although we can see that a system outputs some result, we can never access the reasons why it reached that conclusion. Further, AI systems may reach biased conclusions. Thus, the appropriate standard of care, especially in the life-and-death context of military decision-making, is to carefully scrutinize the results of AI systems rather than accept results uncritically. Perhaps that standard of care was not met here.

However, there are practical problems with this view. First, although we may cognitively recognize the faults in AI decision-making, these systems are utilized because they appear to be informed and objective. Even if one knows the results of these systems ought to be scrutinized, their results may appear more weighty than conclusions of human thinkers. Second, AI systems can make data driven decisions quicker and perhaps more efficiently than human decision-makers. Decisions made in a military context are often incredibly time sensitive and may only command limited resources. There may be only so much scrutinizing decision-makers can do before acting.

Alternatively, one could hold responsible those who created and/or authorized the use of AI-programs in military decision-making. However, as D’arcy Blackwell describes, this may be practically very difficult. Finding the culprit for unacceptable decisions will require searching through paper trails, spatially and temporally far away from the incident itself. Further still, some who at first glance appear responsible may not be. Consider the Pentagon and AI firm Anthropic’s recent public conflict over how Anthropic’s Claude could be utilized. Despite labeling Anthrophic a supply chain risk, and thus prohibiting the use of Claude in fulfilling government contracts, the Pentagon utilized systems which rely upon Claude in target selection during recent strikes in Iran. We may see cases where military decision-makers utilize AI systems in ways not foreseen or endorsed by their creators. Thus, allocating responsibility will face yet another hurdle in these cases.

Thus, the potential role of AI in the decision to strike the elementary appears to muddy the waters. It seems clear in principle that either (or perhaps both) those who approved the strike, those decided to utilize AI in target selection, and/or those who developed the program are responsible for the resultant horrific outcome. Yet once we consider the practical realities facing these decision-makers, coming to a real judgment about who precisely is responsible becomes far more difficult. Even more so if we hope to determine if anyone ought to be punished for the strike.

Ultimately, I worry that these difficulties with allocating responsibility will serve as a significant detriment to human rights practice and international law. The more AI systems are integrated into military decision-making, the harder it will be to determine who bears specific responsibility for the violation of international law. Part of the function of international law, and the law in general, is to create deterrence. We punish people for offenses, in part, to deter others from engaging in the same behavior. But as it becomes more difficult to cleanly allocate responsibility, the more difficult it is to dole out punishment and thus the less the prospect of punishment can serve as a deterrent. So the integration of AI into military decision-making may reduce the status of international humanitarian law to mere norms – the global community has decided that we should not engage in this behavior but punishment will not be forthcoming if you do. This technology may serve as a shield, one that protects those willing to callously throw innocents into the line of fire from facing consequences for their actions.

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Control and the Dark Side of Technological Progress

Iran, with technological support from Chinese companies, has assembled a powerful system of digital censorship and surveillance over the past 15 years. That infrastructure was recently employed – using face recognition, internet blackouts, and, AI – to brutally crush protests, resulting in at least 7,000 deaths. On the other side of the world, two senior AI researchers, Zoë Hitzig at OpenAI and Minank Sharma at Anthropic, resigned, citing concerns about the AI business model and AI safety, respectively. Underlying these seemingly dissimilar events is a shared worry about the dangers of technology and who controls it.

Our stories of innovation and technological progress tend to focus on the broader public. We will have access to new mind-bending entertainment sources, life-changing medical technologies,and a vast array of time-saving devices, so the narrative goes. Yet, the most important impact may not be how it is enjoyed by the everyday consumer, but rather how it is wielded by powerful entities such as governments or large corporations – Iran has over 90 million people; OpenAI’s ChatGPT has over 700 million weekly users.

For many of us, especially in advanced economies, our lives are completely infused with technology. Communication with our friends, the news we read, our access to government services, the tools on which we work, recommendations for doctors and restaurants, our political engagement and activism, are all facilitated by either government- or corporate-controlled digital infrastructure. Often we are exchanging our personal details — birth date, favorite websites, anxieties, etc. — for access. Off our computers, we can be monitored by our phone’s GPS, or watched by our Ring cameras.

Increasingly, the tendency has been towards centralization and top-down control. The largest technology companies, such as Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, and Apple have all embraced a platform approach, where they provide digital real estate and tools, which can then be “rented” by others. Likewise, major Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, charge users or product developers for access to their model. This has led to a digital landscape with very few owners and many borrowers. Even most e-books are simply licensed, rather than owned the way a paper copy is.

At the same time, countries are increasingly asserting digital sovereignty and their right to control digital infrastructure within their territorial domains. China’s Great Firewall is the most famous example, but nations such as Russia and Iran have also developed sophisticated ways to block and shut-off internet access. Even the EU has come to embrace digital sovereignty, although its current concern is minimizing dependence on US tech companies.

This wraparound technological infrastructure – and the data it harvests – represents a great deal of potential control over our lives. This has its advantages. Powerful actors can secure data, fight cybercrime, and provide valuable tools and products. Digital surveillance can be used to fight terrorism. Advertising and data collection allow companies to provide their services at discounted rates.

However, these same powers greatly amplify a tendency already present in 20th-century politics: governments and corporations’ translation of power and knowledge into impact and influence. Their ability to track, monitor, and influence is unrivaled historically.

Given this reality, it is valuable to consider what protects us from the undue exercise of power.

At the most extreme, is the nonexistence of that power. One way to prevent large corporations from wielding such awesome power, for example, is to simply break them up. Similarly, a weakened government can be limited in its capacity to oppress (at the cost of being limited in its capacity to help).

Less extreme are various restraints or counterweights to the exercise of power. For corporations, this includes regulations, supervisory bodies, robust consumer and worker protection laws, and competitive alternatives. For governments, this includes free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, and the separation of powers. A well-functioning government that is responsive to the interests of the people is, of course, better positioned to impose meaningful regulation on corporations than a government that is weak, corrupt, or malfeasant.

Finally, there is mere discretion. Here it is simply a matter of internal restraint whether corporations or governments exercise certain power. As governments and, in a sense, corporations, build up their data-gathering and surveillance architectures, we increasingly rely on trust to maintain data integrity and prevent abuse. This is especially the case for countries like the US with relatively lean regulations, consumer protections, and workers’ rights. On the topic of AI, the US administration asserted in a December executive order that  “AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.” Given the known role such technology can play in deepfakes, data gathering, face recognition, and even cybercrime, this puts a lot of trust in these companies.

Some philosophers emphasize what is called non-domination or republican freedom. The key feature here is that the arbitrary exercise of power is not possible (or is, at least, prohibited), as opposed to merely voluntarily withheld. They emphasize that a slave with a permissive master is still not free.

By the same token, domination represents a particular risk for a world with extraordinarily powerful governmental and corporate actors. We need not just worry about what they do, but what they could do. Good governance may help take the edge off, but can it eliminate the risk entirely? Not every country is blessed with good governance.

We will have to think deeply if we want a world that contains such powerful actors and prevents potential abuses. Do the potential benefits they can provide through incredible resources and economies of scale outweigh the risk of abusing their power? Is it too late to go back?

The accumulation of digital power and the weaponization of technology raise a more general point about the complexity of technological progress. Technological improvement and societal improvement need not walk in lockstep. Certainly, some innovations and new technologies are nearly uncontroversial good things: antibiotics, seatbelts, sanitation, braille.

Still, technological growth is not without its costs and risks. We cannot always see the full effect of new products and innovations – there are always unforeseen dangers and unanticipated applications. It’s also good to remember that the effects of technologies may not refract across a society evenly. AI-fueled innovations that are good for landlords are not necessarily good for renters; those good for companies are not necessarily good for their workers. Technology can exacerbate existing power differentials in society. Nor can we see the combined effect of many different technologies and the, often disorienting, changes they can bring to a society. How will, for example, large language model chatbots like ChatGPT impact how we learn, think, and socialize. It is worth considering what we lose, not just what we gain, in the pursuit of progress.

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AI and the Water Wasting Machine

An argument that’s frequently made against the use of AI (specifically, popular chatbots based on LLMs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc.) is that AI is harmful to the environment. The hardware required to create, train, and run chatbots consumes a significant amount of energy, which in turn requires the use of natural resources, specifically water. Many articles have been written recently that focus on AI’s water usage, with some saying that AI is “accelerating the loss of our scarcest natural resource,” “draining water from areas that need it most,” and that by 2030 it will “match the annual drinking water needs of the United States.”

While the fact that AI needs some amount of water to operate isn’t disputed, there is much more debate around how much it uses. Some AI-defenders, for instance, have argued that the amount of water AI uses is either negligible or at least comparatively negligible given the amount of water that other things use and that we are seemingly okay with. For instance, Sam Altman postulated that a single ChatGPT query uses “roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon” of water per query, while others have written that the AI industry as a whole in the US uses about as much water as its golf courses.

Indeed, “you’ve been thinking about AI’s water use wrong” content is a plentiful resource in 2026. For example, an article from Wired, fittingly titled “You’re Thinking About AI and Water All Wrong,” notes that many early estimates of AI water use are likely off by a not-insignificant amount. And a popular Substack article, less-subtly titled “The AI water issue is fake,” lists the following items alongside the approximate amount of water they take to produce when compared to a prompt for a chatbot:

Leather Shoes – 4,000,000 prompts’ worth of water
Smartphone – 6,400,000 prompts
Jeans – 5,400,000 prompts
T-shirt – 1,300,000 prompts
A single piece of paper – 2550 prompts
A 400 page book – 1,000,000 prompts

These kinds of comparisons are intended not only to challenge the narrative that AI uses a lot of water, but also to defuse the moral argument against AI use on the basis of water consumption. As the Substack author notes: “If you want to send 2500 ChatGPT prompts and feel bad about it, you can simply not buy a single additional piece of paper. If you want to save a lifetime supply’s worth of chatbot prompts, just don’t buy a single additional pair of jeans.” In other words, we risk being moral hypocrites if we criticize AI for its water usage while still reading books and wearing comfortable clothes.

I am not going to question the exact numbers concerning AI water use. Instead, I want to consider the merits of the “you’ve been thinking about AI’s water use wrong” arguments, specifically whether we really are moral hypocrites for criticizing AI on the basis of its water use. If we are okay with playing golf and using phones and doing all sorts of other things that use water, must we refrain from criticizing AI on the same basis? Are the people who think that we shouldn’t use AI because of its water use really thinking about it “all wrong,” or chasing a “fake” issue?

I think that the answer is no: we can still criticize AI on the basis of its water consumption. To illustrate, consider the following thought experiment:

The Water Waster: A company announces a new product: the Water Waster 3000. Here’s how it works: it uses [one/one hundred/one thousand] gallons of potable water every day to spin a wheel. The wheel is not connected to anything, and its only tangible benefit is that some people enjoy watching the wheel spin.

We can write the thought experiment so that the Water Waster 3000 uses different amounts of water. However, no matter which number we chose, we would likely reach the same conclusion: that operating the Water Waster 3000 is a waste of water. Someone who really enjoyed watching wheels spin might argue that, in comparison to other forms of entertainment, a single spin of the wheel uses only a fraction of the amount of water required by other industries. But this argument doesn’t hold much water (so to speak): it doesn’t matter that other things use much more water; what matters is that the Water Waster 3000 wastes it.

It is, of course, unfair to say that the Water Waster 3000 is the exact same thing as an AI chatbot. However, one might argue that AI chatbots and much of the AI industry are akin to the Water Waster 3000 in the sense that the AI industry does not, by and large, produce anything of significant enough value, or at least not enough value to warrant its environmental impact. As argued in the aforementioned Wired article: “People who don’t think twice about eating a burger or buying a new T-shirt are angry about LLMs and water because they are rejecting the entire premise that AI is worth the price of its water use.”

If we approach the argument this way, then we can also avoid the charge of hypocrisy. After all, people need t-shirts and shoes: those things require water to produce, but they’re worth it. Sure, producing clothing has a negative impact on the environment, but since the trade-off is acceptable, it’s not a waste of water, just a use of it.

But does this argument free us from the charge of hypocrisy? After all, we do all sorts of things that arguably do waste water, but still do not subject them to as much scrutiny. For instance, while people certainly need shoes and t-shirts and such, we definitely don’t need as many as people tend to acquire (for example, the environmental damages of so-called “fast-fashion” – mass-produced, cheap and disposable clothing – are well-documented). That AI-enthusiasts often compare the water use of the AI industry to golf courses is thus particularly apt, not only because of the alleged similarities in the amount of water they use, but also because golf doesn’t serve any practical need. Golf is frivolous (arguably), so if we’re happy as a society to accept using a lot of water so that some people can more easily hit a small ball into a small hole that’s really far away, then arguably we should be okay using a similar amount of water for chatbots and other potentially much more useful things.

Of course, the claim that people are hypocritical when it comes to criticizing AI for its environmental impact does not negate the fact that AI use still has an impact on the environment. Using AI can then still be bad because of its water usage, just as it is (arguably) bad that we use a lot of water on golf courses. After all, the claim of moral hypocrisy is not a claim about the rightness or wrongness of an act, but instead about whether one has the grounds to criticize others because of their own acts.

So, perhaps AI is bad because it uses water, but then so is everything else because everything uses water. Isn’t it unfair, then, to single out AI?

Well, not really. We are, after all, in the unenviable position of living in a system where hardly any of our acts as consumers or users of technology are environmentally neutral. If this is enough to undermine our moral authority to criticize, then we could not criticize any acts that have a negative environmental impact, unless those acts are significantly disproportionately more extreme compared to what we do now. But it’s not clear that this is a fair standard to hold people to. Remember our Water Waster 3000: we seem perfectly within our rights to criticize the existence of such a machine, even though we use other, more useful machines that also use water.

The Wired analysis is then perhaps not entirely fair to AI critics: it is not necessarily that people who choose to eat burgers or buy new t-shirts don’t give any thought to the environmental impact of their actions – they might – nor that they think that burgers and t-shirts are worth the environmental costs – they might think they ultimately aren’t. But you can still criticize someone for leaving their tap running even if you happened to have bought a new pair of jeans recently. If AI is a waste of water, then we are not hypocrites for criticizing it.

Of course, the AI-enthusiast would likely reject the idea that AI use really is akin to leaving a tap running or something like the Water Waster 3000, or indeed is a waste of water at all. While it is hard to defend the value of every individual use of an AI chatbot, we might still think that, overall, AI should be conceived of as a use of water that produces something of value, rather than a waste. Maybe what we need to calculate is something like “value-per-milliliter of water used,” where values above a certain level would qualify as being “worth it” while those below are “not worth it.” Where the critic and the enthusiast might disagree, then, is whether AI falls above or below that line.

The ongoing disputes around the amount of water AI uses make this calculation practically impossible. But the charge of hypocrisy assumes that we have an answer to this question, namely that AI is, in fact, worth the water it uses. If we reject this premise, or even just call it into question, then we do not lose our moral ground to hypocrisy.

So, where does this leave us? We’ve seen that it is not enough to defuse the environmental argument against AI use to simply say that AI uses as much or less water than other things that we tend to think are acceptable, either at the level of queries, companies, or the industry as a whole. Nor does the fact that we use water for some things mean that we automatically undermine our ability to criticize AI use on the same basis: we do not lose our moral standing to criticize AI for its environmental impact if we reject the idea that AI is worth its water use. While there will undoubtedly be many more arguments about how much water AI uses, it is still criticizable on that basis.

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The Sloppy Hyperreality of Sora

It must have been a wondrous thing to enter a cathedral in medieval Europe. The stained-glass images of saints and angels would have shone like kaleidoscopes in an otherwise earthy world. Their rainbow patterns, beaming through the haze of incense, would have echoed the cantor’s chants, plangent and unintelligible, reverberating through the nave, casting sacred stories in a rarefied light. By providing a space for extraordinary physical sensations, the cathedral would have drawn the mind from the ordinariness of the everyday toward life’s sacredness and significance.

Today, the cathedral is a mere curiosity. We encounter more images scrolling for an hour on Instagram than a medieval peasant would have encountered in their entire life. The enchantment of the stained-glass saint is hardly visible against the blooming, buzzing digital confusion that surrounds us today. Our relationship to images has changed. Pictures hit differently.

There may be no better place to look for a pointed illustration of this confusion than Sora, OpenAI’s new TikTok-style social media app populated exclusively by AI-generated videos. Like TikTok, Sora feels like a digital conveyor belt designed to jam as much mechanized content into our conscious minds as possible. Videos on the platform vary in style, tone, and content. Many are uncanny. All are fake. The most distinctive feature of Sora is that users can create videos featuring likenesses of real people. By recording three words and a turn of your head, you can depict yourself in nearly any kind of fictional situation and, with permission, you can do the same with the likenesses of other users. You can even create videos depicting long-dead cultural figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bob Ross.

OpenAI markets Sora using the term hyperreal: “Turn your ideas into videos with hyperreal motion and sound.” OpenAI’s use of this term presumably refers to the visual quality of the videos, which are nearly indistinguishable from lens-based recordings. The concept of hyperreality, however, has a deeper cultural pedigree. Ironically, critical theorists have used the term to describe a worrisome shift under capitalist visual culture, one that tech firms like OpenAI have been exacerbating in recent decades.

One of its earliest uses appeared in a 1975 essay by the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, titled “Travels in the Hyperreal” — a critical travelogue documenting a road trip Eco took across the United States. Eco was fascinated by Americans’ obsession with simulations and replicas, such as wax museums, ghost town attractions, and, that ultimate “degenerate utopia,” Disneyland. People are drawn to such simulations, he suggests, because they package our messy realities into perfect, controllable images. These images are pleasant and easy to consume, and so they seem more understandable, and eventually more real, than their referents. This blurs the distinction between the fake and the authentic, which Eco describes as a culture of hyperreality.

The term gained wider traction, however, through the nearly contemporary writings of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who used it more radically to diagnose what he saw as the widespread and fundamentally alienating effect of image-saturated capitalist culture. For Baudrillard, hyperreality is a state in which cultural signs have detached from reality completely. Historically, images could be said to represent the real world either faithfully or falsely. Under capitalist culture, however, signs only reference themselves, pinging back and forth between advertisements, television, movies, magazines, newscasts, and now, social media, making the line between the fake and the authentic no longer relevant.

According to Baudrillard, the detachment of our visual culture from reality has massive consequences for human subjectivity. Immersed in this symbolic game of pinball, we gradually lose our connection to meaning as rooted in embodied human experience. Within the hyperreal, you are unable to interpret the world, or form a judgment about what matters, except by reference to the sign systems around you. You watch a sunset over the ocean, and you are awestruck because it looks almost as beautiful as a movie; you fall in love, and you are excited because you find yourself in your own Cinderella story. While it could be said that sign systems have always structured our experiences, the difference is that these are self-referential and self-generating, rooted in the attempt to dominate human consciousness for profit.

We thus live our lives in a simulation of meaning — what Baudrillard calls the simulacrum — yet we continue to think our beliefs, desires, and preferences are our own. As a simulation, hyperreality is an inescapable paradigm that covers its tracks. One effect of the hyperreal is a flattening out of our cultural signs. Internet culture has already deepened this effect. Taylor Swift, Zohran Mamdani, and Carrie Bradshaw inhabit the same plane of consciousness as we scroll through our seemingly personalized TikTok feeds. This flattening leads to a loss of historical consciousness, as everything becomes an image in the stream. Although it may be comfortable, the simulacrum draws us away from concerns and activities that are integral to human flourishing. There are no shadows in the grocery store; the television never stops flashing. There is no reason to think on death, or, for that matter, anything beyond the soothing and profitable signs in which we are immersed.

As others have suggested, generative AI seems to represent a culmination of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Self-generating, detached from physical reality, yet sneakily naturalistic, images and videos produced by AI replicate many of the key features of the simulacrum. While making videos of yourself and your friends on Sora seems like meaningless fun on the surface, if there is any truth in Baudrillard’s observations, then we must consider the deeper impact these videos may have on our subjectivities as well as our relationships to others.

Disneyland, for all its fakery and capitalist mechanization, is still made and run by humans, as were the advertisements and media images when Baudrillard developed his analysis of the hyperreal. The near eradication of embodied humanity in generative AI’s processes, coupled with the increasingly heightened naturalism of these images, threatens to deepen the negative effects of the hyperreal by creating a media landscape that is nearly, or even completely, non-human. The Dead Internet Theory already claims that most of the internet, including social media, has been taken over by bots and AI-generated “slop.” Since the release of Sora 2 in September 2025, its videos are increasingly found on other social media platforms, often with the Sora watermark removed. Our media culture seems to be drifting further and further from embodied human experience.

However, it is also possible that the extreme mechanization of videos like those produced by Sora might pull the veil back and compel at least some of us to distrust media so deeply that we seek ways to reconnect with embodied experience. For Baudrillard, Disneyland played an important role in the maintenance of hyperreality. Its hyperbolic simulations made the surrounding environs of LA — the strip malls, billboards, Porsche dealerships, etc. — seem real by comparison. This comparative realness, Baudrillard argued, mollifies us by obfuscating the fact that our everyday life is completely and utterly shaped by the simulacrum. However, slop videos, and the technology behind those videos, render the artificiality of our sign systems more salient, at least for technologically savvy users. If you know you’re looking at slop, you know you’re looking at an image that is in some profound way detached from embodied human experience. For some people, this awareness might produce a tear in the veil. To the extent that humans still aim for an authentic engagement with reality, this tear could actually motivate an attempt to escape rather than deepen immersion in the hyperreal.

Yet, escape is not so easy as stepping away from the computer. Our built environment is affected by people’s expectations about what reality should look like, and these expectations are in turn shaped by visual culture. Traveling to Rome in pursuit of an authentic experience, tourists seek out cafés that conform to a Hollywood image. The act of ordering and drinking a cappuccino becomes a performance of that image. When the children of today, raised on Italian brainrot, begin to travel, how will their associations and expectations of Rome change? What kind of images will shape the cities of tomorrow? A better escape route might involve seeking embodied experiences in non-built environments. “Touch grass,” as they say. Yet the fact that “touch grass” is itself a meme embodies the difficulties with this route. Capitalist sign systems digest their own critiques. There may be no escape.

Throughout Silicon Valley, tech companies preach that generative AI will usher in a new age of transcendence, pushing humanity beyond the limitations of our frail, embodied selves. While it’s true that massive increases in computing power will undoubtedly lead to biomedical breakthroughs and other scientific advances, we must ask ourselves: at what cost? It is telling that OpenAI, whose core mission is to develop “artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity,” should create a product that seemingly takes us in the opposite direction.

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Is It Okay to Be Mean to AI?

Fast-food chain Taco Bell recently replaced drive-through workers with AI chatbots at a select number of locations across America. The outcome was perhaps predictable: numerous videos went viral on social media showing customers becoming infuriated with the AI’s mistakes. People also started to see what they could get away with, including one instance where a customer ordered 18,000 waters, temporarily crashing the system.

As AI programs start to occupy more mundane areas of our lives, more and more people are getting mad at them, are being mean to them, or are just trying to mess with them. This behavior has apparently become so pervasive that AI company Anthropic announced that its chatbot Claude would now end conversations when they were deemed “abusive.” Never one to shy away from offering his opinion, Elon Musk went to Twitter to express his concerns, remarking that “torturing AI is not okay.”

Using terms like “abuse” and “torture” already risks anthropomorphizing AI, so let’s ask a simpler question: is it okay to be mean to AI?

We asked a similar question at the Prindle Post a few years ago, when chatbots had only recently become mainstream. That article argued that we should not be cruel to AIs, since by acting cruelly towards one thing we might get into the habit of acting cruelly towards other things, as well. However, chatbots and our relationships with them have changed in the years since their introduction. Is it still the case that we shouldn’t be mean to them? I think the answer has become a bit more complicated.

There is certainly still an argument to be made that, as a rule, we should avoid acting cruelly whenever possible, even if it is towards inanimate objects. Recent developments in AI have, however, raised a potentially different question regarding the treatment of chatbots: whether they can be harmed. The statements from Anthropic and Musk seem to imply that they can, or at least that there is a chance that they can be, and thus that you shouldn’t be cruel to chatbots because doing so at least risks causing harm to the chatbot itself.

In other words, we might think that we shouldn’t be mean to chatbots because they have moral status: they are the kinds of things that can be morally harmed, benefitted, and evaluated as good or bad. There are lots of things that have moral status – people and other complex animals are usually the things we think of first, but we might also think about simpler animals, plants, and maybe even nature. There are also lots of things that we don’t typically think have moral status, as well: inanimate objects, machines, single-cell organisms, things like that.

So how can we determine whether something has moral status? Here’s one approach: whether something has moral status depends on certain properties that it has. For example, we might think that the reason people have moral status is because they have consciousness, or perhaps because they have brains and a nervous system, or some other property. These aren’t the only properties we can choose. For example, 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that animals should be afforded many more rights than they were at the time, not because they have consciousness or the ability to reason, per se, but simply because they are capable of suffering.

What about AI chatbots, then? Despite ongoing hype, there still is no good reason to believe any chatbot is capable of reasoning in the way that people are, nor is there any good reason to believe that they possess “consciousness” or are capable of suffering in any sense. So if it can’t reason, isn’t conscious, and can’t suffer, should we definitively rule out chatbots from having moral status?

There is potentially another way of thinking about moral status: instead of thinking about the properties of the thing itself, we should think about our relationship with it. Philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh considers cases where people have become attached to robot companions, arguing that, for example, “if an elderly person is already very attached to her Paro robot and regards it as a pet or baby, then what needs to be discussed is that relation, rather than the ‘moral standing’ of the robot.” According to this view, it’s not important whether a robot, AI, or really anything else has consciousness or can feel pain when thinking about moral status. Instead, what’s important when considering how we should treat something is our experiences with and relationship to it.

You may have had a similar experience: we can become attached to objects and feel that they deserve consideration that other objects do not. We might also ascribe more moral status to some things rather than others, depending on our relationship with them. For example, someone who eats meat can recognize that their pet dog or cat is comparable in terms of relevant properties to a pig, insofar as they are all capable of suffering, have brains and complex nervous systems, etc. Regardless, although they have no problem eating a pig, they would likely be horrified if someone suggested they eat their pet. In this case, they might ascribe some moral status to a pig, but would ascribe much more moral status to their pet because of their relationship with it.

Indeed, we have also seen cases where people have become very attached to their chatbots, in some cases forming relationships with them or even attempting to marry them. In such cases, we might think that there is a meaningful moral relationship, regardless of any properties the chatbot has. If we were to ascribe a chatbot moral status because of our relationship with it, though, its being a chatbot is incidental: it would be a thing that we are attached to and consider important, but that doesn’t mean that it thereby has any of the important properties we typically associate with having moral status. Nor would our relationship be generalizable: just because one person has an emotional attachment to a chatbot does not mean that all relationships with chatbots are morally significant.

Indeed, we have seen that not all of our experiences with AI have been positive. As AI chatbots and other programs occupy a larger part of our lives, they can make our lives more frustrating and difficult, and thus we might establish relationships with them that do not hold them up as objects of our affection or care, but as obstacles and even detriments to our wellbeing. Are there cases, then, where a chatbot might not be deserving of our care, but rather our condemnation?

For example, we have all likely been in a situation where we had to deal with frustrating technology. Maybe it was an outdated piece of software you were forced to use, or an appliance that never worked as it was supposed to, or a printer that constantly jammed for seemingly no good reason. None of these things have the properties that make them a legitimate subject of moral evaluation: they don’t know what they’re doing, have no intentions to upset anyone, and have none of the obligations that we would expect from a person. Nevertheless, it is the relationship we’ve established with them that seems to make them an appropriate target of our ire. It is not only cathartic to yell profanities at the office printer after its umpteenth failure at completing a simple printing task, it is justified.

When an AI chatbot takes the place of a person and fails to work properly, it is no surprise that we would start to have negative experiences with it. While failing to properly take a Taco Bell order is, all things considered, not a significant indignity, it is symptomatic of a larger trend of problems that AI has been creating, ranging from environmental impact, to job displacement, to overreliance resulting in cognitive debt, to simply creating more work for us than before they existed. Perhaps, then, ordering 18,000 waters in an attempt to crash an unwelcome AI system is less cruel as it is a righteous expression of indignation.

The dominant narrative around AI – perpetrated by tech companies – is that it will bring untold benefits that will make our lives easier, and that it will one day be intelligent in the way human beings are. If these things were true, then it would be easier to be concerned with the so-called “abuse” of AI. However, given that AI programs do not have the properties for moral status, and that our relationships with them are frequently ones of frustration, perhaps being mean to an AI isn’t such a big deal after all.

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Robot Kitchens, AI Cooks, and the Meaning of Food

I knew that I was very probably not going to die, of course. Very few people get ill from pufferfish in restaurants. But I still felt giddy as I took my first bite, as though I could taste the proximity of death in that chewy, translucent flesh. I swilled my saki, squeezed some lemon onto the rest of my sashimi, and looked up. Through the serving window I could see the chef who held my life in his busy hands. We made eye contact for a moment. I took another bite. This is absurd. I am absurd. I pictured the people I love, across the ocean in sleeping California, stirring gently in their warm, musky beds.

My experience in Tokyo eating pufferfish, a delicacy known as fugu, was rich and profound. Fugu has an unremarkable taste. But pufferfish is poisonous; it can be lethal unless it is prepared in just the right way by a highly trained chef. My experience was inflected with my knowledge of the food’s provenance and properties: that this flesh in my mouth was swimming in a tank a few minutes ago and was extracted from its lethal encasement by a man who has dedicated his life to this delicate task. Seconds ago, it was twitching on my plate. And now it might bring me a lonely death in an unfamiliar land. This knowledge produced a cascade of emotions and associations as I ate, prompting reflections on my life and the things I care about.

Fugu is an unfamiliar illustration of the familiar fact that our eating experiences are often constituted by more than physical sensations and a drive for sustenance. Attitudes relating to the origin or context of our food (such as a belief that this food might kill me, or that this food was made with a caring hand) often affect our eating experiences. There is much more to food, as a site of human experience and culture, than sensory and nutritional properties.

You would be hard pressed to find someone who denies this. Yet we are on the cusp of societal changes in food production that could systematically alter our relationship to food and, consequently, our eating experiences. These changes are part of broader trends apparent across nearly all spheres of life resulting from advances in artificial intelligence and other automation technologies. Just as an AI system can now drive your taxi, process your loan application, and write your emails, so AI and related automation tools can now make your food, at home or in a restaurant. Many technologists in Silicon Valley are trying to make automated food production ubiquitous. One CEO of a successful company I spoke with said he expects that almost no human beings will be cooking in thirty years’ time, kind of like how today very few humans make soap, toys, or clothing by hand. It may sound ridiculous, but I’ve found that this vision is common in influential industry spaces.

What might life look like if this technological vision were to come about? This question can appear trivial relative to louder questions about autonomous weapons systems, AI medicine, or the existential threat of a superintelligence. It is not a question of life and death. But I think the question points to a more insidious possibility: that our technological advances might quietly erode the conditions that enable us to experience our day-to-day lives as meaningful.

On the one hand, the struggle for sustenance is a universal feature of human life, and everyone is a potential beneficiary of technology that streamlines food production, like AI that invents recipes or performs kitchen managerial work and robots that prepare food. Home cooking robots could save people time and effort that would be better spent elsewhere. A restaurant that staffs fewer humans could save on labor costs and pass these savings on to customers. Robots could mitigate human errors relating to hygiene or allergies. And then there is the possibility of automated systems that can personalize food to each consumer’s specific tastes and dietary requirements. Virtually every technologist I have spoken to in this industry is excited about a future where every diner can receive a bespoke meal that leaves them totally satisfied and healthy, every time.

Automation brings interesting aesthetic possibilities, too. AI can augment human creativity by helping pioneer unusual flavor pairings. The knowledge that your food was created by a sexy robot could enhance your eating experience, especially if the alternative would be a miserable and underpaid laborer.

These are nice possibilities. But one thing that automation tends to do is create distance between humans and the things that are automated. Our food systems already limit our contact with the sources of our food. For example, factory farming hides the processes through which meat is produced, concealing moral problems and detracting from pleasures of eating that are rooted in participation in food production. AI and robotics could create even more distance between us and our food. Think of the Star Trek replicator as an extreme case; the diner calls for food, and it simply appears via a wholly automated process.

Why is the prospect of losing touch with food processes concerning? For some it might not be. There are many sources of value in the world, and there is no one right way to relate to food. But, personally, I find the prospect of losing touch with food concerning because my most memorable food experiences have all been conditioned by my contact with the processes through which my food came to be.

I have a sybaritic streak. I enjoy being regaled at fancy restaurants with diseased goose livers, spherified tonics, perfectly plated tongues, and other edible exotica. But these experiences tend to pass for me like a kaleidoscopic dream, filled with rarefied sensations that can’t be recalled upon waking. The eating experiences I cherish most are those in which my food is thickly connected to other things that I care about, like relationships, ideas, and questions that matter to me. These evocative connections are established through contact with the process through which my food was made.

I’ve already mentioned one example, but I can think of many others. Like when, in the colicky confusion of graduate school, Sam and I slaughtered and consumed a chicken in the living room of his condo so that we might, as men of principle, become better acquainted with the hidden costs of our food. Or when I ordered tripas tacos for Stephen, my houseguest in Santa Barbara, which he thoroughly enjoyed until, three tacos in, he asked me what ‘tripas’ meant. Or when I made that terrible tuna-fish casserole filled with glorious portions of shredded cheese and Goldfish crackers for Amy, Jacob, and Allison so that they might become sensuously acquainted with a piece of my childhood. Or when Catelynn and I sat in that tiny four-seat kitchen overlooking the glittering ocean in Big Sur and were served sushi, omakase style, directly from the chef’s greasy, gentle hands, defining a shared moment of multisensory beauty.

These experiences fit into the fabric of my life in unique and highly meaningful ways. These experiences are mine, but you probably have some like it. The thing to notice is that these sorts of experiences would be inaccessible without contact with the provenance of food. They would not be possible in a world where all food was produced by a Star Trek replicator. This suggests that food automation threatens to erode an important source of human meaning.

Really, there are all sorts of concerns you might have about AI and robotics in the culinary sphere. Many of these have been identified by my colleague Patrick Lin. But for me, the erosion of meaning is worth emphasizing in discussions about technology because this kind of cost resists quantification, making it easy to overlook. It’s the sort of thing that might not show up on a cost-benefit of a tech CEO who speaks glibly about eliminating human cooking.

The point I’m making is not that we should reject automation. The point is that as we augment and replace human labor in restaurants, home kitchens, and other spheres of life, we need to be attentive to how the processes we hope to automate away may enrich our lives. An increase in efficiency according to quantifiable criteria (time, money, waste) can diminish squishier but no less important things. Sometimes this provides a reason to insist on an alternative vision in which humans remain in contact with the processes in question. I would argue this is true in the kitchen; humans should retain robust roles in the processes through which our food comes to be.

After my meal in Tokyo, I used my phone to find an elevated walkway on which to smoke. I took a drag on a cigarette and watched a group of men under an overpass producing music, in the old way, by a faint neon light. I could feel the fugu in my belly, and my thoughts flashed to my loves and hopes. One of the men playing a guitar looked up. We made eye contact for a moment. I took another drag. This is nice. I am happy.

 

Note: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2220888.  Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Can an AI Be Your Friend?

According to a July report by the World Health Organization, one in six humans are experiencing loneliness and social isolation – a condition with serious public health consequences ranging from anxiety to chronic illness. This builds on enduring concerns of a “loneliness epidemic,” especially among young men in developed economies. Although some take issue with “epidemic” language, arguing it misframes longstanding loneliness concerns as new and spreading ones, the threat is real and persistent.

Meanwhile, large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as AI companions such as Replika and Nomi, have emerged as sources of digital support and friendship. Many teens report social interactions with AI companions, although only 9% explicitly consider them friends. But the numbers may grow, with 83% of Gen Z believing they can form emotional ties with AI companions per an, admittedly self-interested, report by the Girlfriend.ai platform.

Should AI chatbots be part of the solution to the loneliness epidemic?

Of course, AI as a tool can be part of the solution. One can ask ChatGPT about social events in their city, to help them craft a text asking someone out, or to propose some hobbies based on their interests. This is using AI as a writing aid and search tool. But the ethical issue I’m concerned with is whether an AI friend or companion should be part of the solution.

One place to start is with what we want friendship to be. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle designates three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. With utility, a friend provides something useful but does not care about your well-being. A friendship of pleasure involves mutual activities or enjoyment. Finally, a friendship of virtue involves genuine mutual care for well-being and each other’s growth. Aristotle considered friendship of virtue to be true friendship.

An AI chatbot can provide utility, and one may derive pleasure from interacting with a chatbot or AI companion, so it can provide some of the functions of friendship, but current AI chatbots cannot genuinely care about someone’s well-being. At least from an Aristotelian perspective, then, AI cannot be a true friend.

This does not rule out the value of AI companionship. Humans often have asymmetric relationships that nonetheless provide great satisfaction, for example relationships with pets or parasocial relationships with celebrities. (Granted, many would allege that at least some pets like dogs and cats can care about other’s well-being even if they cannot help one grow as a person.) The human tendency to anthropomorphize has led to a long legacy of relationships with completely mindless entities, from pet rocks to digital pets like Tamagotchi. And then, of course, there are imaginary friends.

But none of those are really seriously proposed as solutions to loneliness. Plausibly, a surge of emotional support through pet rocks, imaginary friends, or more realistically, dogs, is more a symptom of loneliness than an actual solution.

Moreover, there seems to be something distinct about chatbots. A dog may provide some of the intimacy of human friendship, but the dog will never pretend to be a human. By contrast, chatbots and AI companions are designed to act like human friends. Or, well, not quite human friends — there’s a key difference.

AI companions are programmed to “listen” attentively, respond generously, and support and affirm the beliefs of those communicating with them. This provides a particularly cotton candy-esque imitation of friendship, based on agreement and validation. AI sycophancy, it is sometimes called. Undoubtedly, this feels good. But does it do us good?

This August police reported one of the first cases of an AI chatbot potentially leading to murder. ChatGPT usage continually reinforced 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelburg’s paranoia about his mother drugging him. Ultimately, he killed her and then himself.

The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine similarly allege that ChatGPT contributed to his suicide, and are now suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

While extreme examples, in both cases, the endless affirmations of ChatGPT emerge as a concern. Increasingly psychologists are seeing “AI psychosis” where the incredibly human-like, flattering, and supportive nature of chatbots can suck people further into delusion. By contrast, a virtuous friend (on Aristotle’s account) is interested in your well-being, but not necessarily in people-pleasing. They can tell you to snap out of a negative spiral or that you are the problem.

Can better programming fix this? An August 26th, OpenAI published a blog post, “Helping people when they need it most,” discussing some of the safeguards they built into ChatGPT and where they are still trying to improve. This includes avoiding providing guidance on self-harm and working with physicians and psychologists on mental health protections.

However, programming can only solve technical problems. No amount of safety tweaks will make a large language model care about someone’s well-being; it can merely help it better pretend.

Ultimately, AI companies and the virtuous friend have very different aims and motivations. At some level, the purpose of an AI company is to turn a profit. What the precise business model(s) will be has yet to emerge, as currently most AI is still burning through investors’ money. But whatever strategy eventually arises – whether nudging customers towards buying certain products or maximizing engagement and subscription fees – it will be distinct from the sincere regard of Aristotelian friendship. Worse, to the extent that AI chatbots and companions can alleviate loneliness, they rely on this loneliness in the first place to generate demand for the product.

AI companions may be able to fill some of the functions that friendship does – offering a steady hand or a kind word. However, they fundamentally cannot deliver the mutual caring that we expect from the truest form of friendship. Advancements to replication of depth and sincerity will no doubt be made, but what will remain constant is the lack of genuine empathy. Instead of a cure for our loneliness and isolation, the turn to large language models may simply mark the next stage of the disease.

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AI’s Videogamification of Art

Criticisms of AI-generated art are now familiar, ranging from the unauthorized use of artists’ works to train models, to the aping of art styles that border on plagiarism, to claims that AI enthusiasts fail to understand that creating art requires intention and purpose and is antithetical to being produced automatically by a program. While these criticisms remain as important as ever, AI programs continue to evolve, and with new capabilities come new issues.

Case in point: Google’s new Genie 3, which allows users to create “interactive, playable environments” on the basis of prompts and images. To demonstrate the technology, a Google researcher showed how one could “walk around” famous paintings, such as The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David and Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. The AI program generates a 3D world, allowing users to see characters and objects in the original painting from different angles, essentially creating a kind of videogame, albeit one in which there’s not much to do (at least for now).

I think there is good reason to be critical of AI that makes rudimentary videogames out of works of art. Here I’ll consider three such criticisms. The first two can be commonly found in the comments on social media: first, that using AI to digitally manipulate art is disrespectful to the artist or artwork itself; and second, that choosing to interact with the videogamified artwork represents a failure of imagination on the part of the user. I’ll also consider a new version of an old criticism from the philosophy of art: that AI-generated creations lack the original artwork’s aura.

There is a sense in which manipulating art in this way isn’t new. After all, so-called “immersive experiences” have been popular for a while now, such as Immersive Van Gogh, where visitors can walk among projections of some of Van Gogh’s most recognizable artworks. These experiences are sometimes criticized for being tacky and a tourist trap, but few would consider them egregious crimes against art. It’s also long been accepted by all but the stodgiest scholars that videogames are capable of being aesthetically valuable, so it’s not as though we should think that only oil paintings in ornate frames hanging in galleries are worthy of our aesthetic appreciation.

So what’s wrong with using AI to create a virtual world out of a painting? First off, we might worry that using these programs disrespects the original artist, who likely did not intend their work to be a virtual environment to be walked around in. Part of the problem is that AI programs struggle with generating environments that are coherent, producing artifacts and noise that detract from the original composition of the work of art. In the example of the world created out of Hopper’s Nighthawks, for example, AI-generated faces and words became garbled messes, with the end product feeling akin to vandalism.

This first criticism is an aesthetic one: AI programs that videogamify art ruin the artist’s vision, taking something beautiful and making it grotesque. We might also be tempted to criticize the person who chooses to engage with an artwork via its AI-generated videogame form. Commenters on social media are particularly liable to sling this kind of mud, accusing AI art fans of exhibiting a wide range of personal failings. While social media tends not to feature the most careful debates, one criticism that is worth singling out is that engaging with AI-manipulated versions of artworks represents a failure of imagination.

Why think this? Part of what’s involved in appreciating an artwork is to engage with it on its own terms, which requires interpreting what the artist has put in front of you and what they have left out. We might argue that getting an AI program to fill in the blanks by creating a navigable 3D environment is like taking a shortcut, where you are getting a program to do the work required to appreciate a work of art for you.

We’ve seen this kind of criticism when it comes to people using chatbots to write for them: writing is meaningful when it is intentional and effortful, and it loses that meaning when we offload our cognitive functions to programs. In the same way, using an AI program to generate a world out of a painting offloads your imagination and prevents you from being able to meaningfully appreciate a work of art.

So, the first criticism of AI videogamified art pertains to how a person treats an artist or artwork, and the second is a criticism of the person who uses such programs. The last argument I’ll consider is a bit different: that turning an artwork into a 3D virtual environment provides a subpar aesthetic experience because it fails to capture the original artwork’s aura.

This argument (or at least a form of it) comes from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who wrote on art and aesthetics in the first half of the 20th century. Benjamin was concerned with a practice that was becoming more and more frequent at the time: that artworks were being reproduced, sometimes on a massive scale. An original painting, Benjamin argued, is unique, and when experienced in a certain place and time, has a presence about it, or what he calls an “aura.” It is a concept perhaps better experienced than described: there is some feeling that you get when encountering an artwork in a gallery as opposed to seeing a picture of it online, or as a postcard in a gift shop.

Benjamin’s worry was that copies of artworks fail to capture something that can only be possessed by the original. He did not, of course, have a conception of modern AI tools, or virtual 3D environments, or videogames. But Benjamin’s complaint still feels apt when experiencing new AI creations today: you’re no longer interacting with the original, but instead something that has been manipulated, and in doing so you fail to have the same kind of aesthetic experience. This criticism is not the charge that you’re necessarily lacking in imagination by engaging with the AI-generated version of a painting instead of the original; it’s just that it’s a shame that you’re missing out on having a more meaningful aesthetic experience.

How serious these criticisms are is up for debate, and many online have argued that new ways for AI programs to create and manipulate artworks really amounts to little more than cool new technology. Regardless, something of value does seem to be lost when interacting with the videogamified version of artworks instead of engaging with them on their own terms. When it comes to having a meaningful aesthetic experience, AI continues to feel like little more than a novelty.

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Why My Students Shouldn’t Use AI Either

Every semester since ChatGPT arrived on the public stage, I have spent considerable time thinking about how to handle AI use with my students, and I have changed my answer each semester. This year, for the first time, I am going to ask that my students unequivocally avoid using it for any reason. Fortunately, I am not alone in this approach. Fellow Prindle author Daniel Burkett has offered three moral reasons why students should not use AI: it harms creators, the environment, and the students themselves. I would like to offer a few more reasons (though not all explicitly moral) to consider.

Argument 4: AI Erodes Responsibility

As AI systems infiltrate our human decision-making processes and social order more deeply, they are contributing to the erosion of accountability. To be sure, many AI evangelists who tout the benefits of AI will be quick to point out that it is on the human user to verify the legitimacy of AI outputs and use them responsibly. However, I am skeptical that this solution can overcome the accountability concerns I have.

Consider one personal anecdote. Last year, another driver hit my partner while she was driving our car and our insurance increased. When we called the insurance company, we wanted an explanation of why we would be paying the new amount. We were not objecting to having to pay more (though, it does feel unjust to have to pay more for an accident you are not at fault for). We simply wanted to know why the increase was $23 as opposed to $15 or $20. When we asked, the response we received was ultimately “I don’t know, that’s just what the system is telling me.” When we asked who we could contact to ask for more details, they said there was no one that could help us.

This example points out a larger issue with the integration of AI systems in social structures. We often think of accountability in cases where things go wrong, but conceptually accountability is about tracking responsibility for outcomes, whatever they may be. When we include AI in more of our life activities, we lose the thread of accountability. The reason for why something happened will increasingly stop with the answer “AI.” What makes AI unique is that it can behave like an agent in ways previous technologies have been unable to, which will make it well suited to enter into the stream of accountability and muddy the waters.

Furthermore, as these systems are more deeply integrated into our technologies and daily life, they will be treated as more trustworthy (regardless of whether they actually are). When people use technology that everyone is using, in the way that everyone is using it, it can be reasonable to ask for clemency when things go awry because they were just doing what was considered standard practice.

In my classrooms, we study ideas and arguments about serious topics: medical ethics, justice, propaganda, and technology. I want students to learn how to formulate ideas, explore their contours, and ultimately form well founded beliefs that they can claim some form of ownership over. Given the propensity of AI systems to obscure the trail of accountability, I will be prohibiting its use because I want students to retain accountability for the ideas they produce in my classrooms.

Argument 5: AI Undermines Growth

One of the promises of AI is that it will take over some tasks for us, in order to free our minds and time up for more important things. We have also been promised that it will stimulate the creation of new, undiscovered roles in society. So far, many of these prophesied positions relate to the management of AI itself: we now need AI policy experts, AI oversight experts, AI alignment specialists, and AI testers, to name just a few.

While we have yet to see an influx of new and exciting career paths beyond those related to managing AI, we do have reason to think that as AI takes over activities for us we will no longer be able to do those things as well. A preliminary study suggests if doctors go from not using AI, to using AI, and then back to not using AI, they get worse at making diagnoses than they were before they started using AI in the workplace. This should not surprise us. When we stop practicing skills, we lose our edge.

Echoing Burkett’s piece, in the realm of philosophy there is virtually no good reason for my students to use AI because every use case seems to undermine the very skills I want them to learn. When I ask my students how they use it, they typically tell me that they draft their own work and then feed it to AI to make it more professional. However, my philosophy courses are not about producing something that sounds convincing or looks professional (though it is nice when this happens). It’s about learning how to think well. When students write an argument defending a position, and then feed it to AI to help make it more professional, they are missing out on practicing one of the crucial skills I am trying to teach them. Editing a paper for logical coherence, careful word choice, and conceptual analysis is part of the skill building process, and AI impedes this.

Argument 6: AI Is Ideological

AI is currently (and will always likely be) infused with ideology. Nicholas Kreuder has written about the dangers that come from the power that the owners of AI have over us, which reveals the ideological nature of these systems and the risks we have when we rely on them.

If AI is given guardrails, those guardrails will be given using the political, moral, and, likely, economic principles that the creators deem appropriate. Even a radical AI enthusiast who believes AI needs to be absolutely “free” would be instantiating an ideology within the AI system if they chose to avoid any guardrails at all. The choice of what data to train the system on and what to exclude will also be one rooted in some ideological choice. And, insofar as these systems need to generate profit, they will always feel the ideological pull of economic interest.

This problem is not unique to AI, of course. The fact that the phrase “to google” is synonymous with the action of searching for something on the internet reveals the informational monopoly that one company wields over a huge portion of the world. And, the way that Google organizes search results is also far from ideology free.

AI ideology is an issue not because it is ideological per se, as most technologies cannot avoid being infused with some kind of ideology. It is that AI is especially good at projecting confidence and expertise. AI writes convincingly from the perspective of many who use it (while many PhDs have criticized AI’s performance as laughable, even childish, this is not representative of the experience that many have while using it).

The problem with AI, then, is not just that it presents information confidently, but that when you ask it questions about controversial political and ethical issues, it appears to give balanced and unbiased answers. You can even instruct the AI to be unbiased and it will tell you that it will do that. But, in reality it cannot. (Notably, if you ask it “can you be unbiased?” it can also correctly tell you that this is not really possible).

While my ideological complaint also applies to pre-AI technologies like the Google search, the television, the radio, or the book, I think that conversing with AI poses a special problem. The confident, conversational, and apparent unbiased delivery of information occludes the ideological bent that AI systems have.

Argument 7: A Refuge From AI

Many of us feel compelled to use AI whether we like it or not out of a fear of being left behind (FOMO is a real tactic in the tech marketing world). I suspect that AI will be used by many of my students because they feel that they must for “educational” purposes. I also know that outside of the university context, students will be required to use AI for their jobs and are forced to use it when interacting with the sociotechnical infrastructure around them.

The final, simple reason I will prohibit AI in my classroom this semester is to give my students a place of refuge from it. My hope this fall is to give students the room to slow down, make mistakes, and think for themselves without the pressure to be perfect. Although it promises to make our lives easier, AI is ultimately a tool that entices us to work harder. It promises to help us make things better, do things faster, and make us stronger. But this is machine logic, and we are human after all. So, this fall I will say no to AI.

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Is Artificial Intelligence Sustainable?

A recent advertisement for Google’s “Gemini” artificial intelligence (AI) model shows users engaged in frivolous, long-form conversations with their AI personal assistant. “We can have a conversation about anything you like,” Gemini cheerfully informs one user, who is unsure of how to approach this new technology. Another user asks Gemini, “how do you tell if something is spicy without tasting it?” to which Gemini responds (without any hint of the stating-the-obvious sarcasm with which a human may be expected to reply such an inane question) “have you tried smelling it?” What is clear from this advert, and other similar adverts produced by companies such as Meta, is that the companies designing and selling AI intend for its adoption to be ubiquitous. The hope of “big tech” is that AI will be used liberally, for “anything” as the advert says, becoming part of the background technological hum of society in just the same way as the internet.

Awkwardly for these companies, this push for the pervasive adoption of AI into all realms of life is coinciding with a climate and ecological crisis that said technologies threaten to worsen. “Data centers,” the physical infrastructure upon which AI systems depend, are predicted by the IEA to double in their energy consumption from 2022 levels by 2026, consuming around 4.5% of total electricity generated globally by 2030 – which would rank them fifth in the list of electricity usage by country, just behind Russia and ahead of Japan. This of course comes with a significant carbon footprint, driving up global energy demand at precisely the moment that frugality is required if countries are to meet their net-zero goals. Such a significant increase in electricity usage is likely to extend our dependency on fossil fuels as efforts to decarbonize supply can’t keep up with demand.

Beyond electricity usage, data centers also require both vast amounts of water for cooling and rare-earth minerals to produce the hardware components out of which they are built. Google’s data centers consumed (that is, evaporated) approximately 31 billion liters of water in 2024 alone. This at a time when water scarcity is already a serious problem throughout much of the world, with two-thirds of the global population experiencing severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year. Similarly, the mining of rare-earth minerals such as antimony, gallium, indium, silicon, and tellurium is another aspect of the AI supply chain known to wreak both ecological and social havoc. China, by far the world’s largest processor of rare-earth minerals, having realized the heavy environmental toll of rare-earth mines, have now mostly outsourced mining to countries such as Myanmar, where the mining process has poisoned waterways and destroyed communities.

Given the vast resources required to build, train, and maintain AI models, it is fair to question the wisdom of asking them “anything.” Do we really need power-hungry state-of-the-art algorithms to tell us that we can smell an ingredient to check whether it’s spicy?

In response to such sustainability concerns, Google has pointed out that alongside the more mundane uses of AI displayed in its advertisement, the implementation of AI throughout industry promises a raft of efficiency savings that could result in an overall net-benefit impact on global emissions. In its 2025 environmental report, Google describes what it calls an “optimal scenario” based on IEA research stating that the widespread adoption of existing AI applications could lead to emissions reductions that are “far larger than emissions from data centers.” Although, some of the IEA’s claims are based on the somewhat spurious assumption that efficiency savings will be converted into reduced emissions rather than simply lowering prices and increasing consumption (for example, some of the emissions reductions predicted by the IEA’s report come from the application of AI to the oil and gas sector itself, including helping to “assess where oil and gas may be present in sufficiently large accumulations”).

Even granting a level of skepticism here, the potential of AI to produce positive outcomes for both the environment and humanity shouldn’t be overlooked. Initiatives such as “AI for Good,” that seeks to use AI to measure and advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and “AI for the Planet,” an alliance that explores the potential of AI “as a tool in the fight against climate change,” illustrate the optimism around AI as a tool for building a more sustainable future. In fact, a 2022 report produced by “AI for the Planet” claims the technology could be implemented in three key areas in the fight against climate change: mitigation, through measuring and reducing emissions; adaptation, through predicting extreme weather and sea-level rise; and finally, research and education.

There is also potential to use AI as a tool for biodiversity conservation. Research carried out by The University of Cambridge identified several applications for AI in conservation science, including: using visual and audio recognition to monitor population sizes and identify new species; monitoring the online wildlife trade; using digital twins to model ecosystems; and predicting and mitigating human–wildlife conflicts. However, the authors also point to the significant risk of eroding support and funding for smaller scale-participatory research in favor of the larger and wealthier institutions able to carry out AI-based research. Additionally, they highlight the risk of the creation of a colonial system whereby data is extracted from lower-income countries to train models in data centers in North America and Europe, resulting in the export of AI-driven mandates for the use of resources and land back to those lower-income countries.

Such risks indicate the need to consider an important distinction that has been made in the field of AI ethics. Philosophers such as Aimee van Wynsberghe and Henrik Skaug Sætra have argued for the need to move from an “isolationist” to a “structural” analysis of the sustainability of AI technologies. Instead of thinking of AI models as “isolated entities to be optimized by technical professionals,” they must be considered “as a part of a socio-technical system consisting of various structures and economic and political systems.” This means that the sustainability of AI doesn’t come down to a simple cost-benefit analysis of energy and resources used versus those saved through greater efficiency and sustainability applications. In order to fully understand the indirect and systemic effects of AI on environmental sustainability, these philosophers argue, we need to consider AI models in their social and political context.

A structural analysis must begin by pointing out that we live in a system characterized by immense inequalities of both wealth and power. As it stands, most AI models are owned and operated by tech companies whose billionaire CEOs have been described as oligarchs. These companies are the principal beneficiaries of a political system driven by economic growth and fueled through resource extraction. We should expect the AI models they produce to propagate this system, further concentrating power and capital to serve the narrow set of interests represented by these companies and their owners. A purely “isolationist” focus suits these interests as AI’s positive applications can be emphasized, while any negative effects, such as vast levels of resource usage, can be presented as technical problems to be ironed out, rather than systemic issues requiring political reform.

To take some examples already touched upon in this article, an isolationist approach can highlight the efficiency savings that are made possible by using AI models to streamline industry, while a structural approach will point out the economic reality that efficiency-savings tend to be harnessed only to ramp up production, lowering prices and leading to increased consumption, and therefore, higher profits. An isolationist approach can view the dependence of AI on large quantities of rare-earth minerals as a technical problem to be solved through more efficient design, whereas the structural approach will point to the need to address the immense injustices that are intrinsic to the rare-earth supply chain. An isolationist approach will tout the potential for AI models to guide ecological restoration in lower-income countries, while a structural approach will point out how this echoes the colonial history of conservation science.

Once we start to consider AI within its political and socio-economic context rather than as an isolated technological artefact, we can look beyond its direct applications for sustainability so that its many troubling indirect and systemic implications come into sharper focus. It becomes apparent that, rather than promoting sustainability, there is a far greater propensity for AI to enable further resource extraction, evade environmental regulations, and manipulate public debate and opinion on environmental issues.

A striking example of this is the way that AI is being used to undermine public trust in climate science. A report authored by the Stockholm Resilience Centre argues that the ability to generate synthetic text, images, and video at scale could fuel a “perfect storm” of climate misinformation, whereby AI models produce vast amounts of climate denial content that is then disseminated through social media algorithms already geared towards bolstering controversial and polarizing content. Consider this faux-academic paper recently written by Elon Musk’s Grok 3 model that casts doubt on the science of anthropogenic global warming. The paper was widely circulated on social media as an example of the first “peer-reviewed” research led by AI. Of course, claims of “peer-review” are unfounded. Neither the publisher nor the journal are part of the Committee of Publication Ethics and the paper was submitted and published within just twelve days, with no indication of whether it underwent open, single, or double-blind review. It should come as no surprise that one of the co-authors, astrophysicist Willie Soon, is a climate denier known to have received millions in funding from the fossil fuel industry, and whose contested research was referenced by the AI-generated paper. Despite such an obvious conflict of interest, a blog-post by the COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Robert Malone gathered more than a million views, claiming that the use of AI meant that the paper was free from the biases of what he describes as “the debacle of man-made climate change.”

From a “structural” perspective then, ensuring that AI models are sustainable is not merely a technical issue but a political issue of confronting the systems and power-structures within which AI technologies are built and utilized. One step in the right direction is to democratize AI governance such that ultimate control over AI’s direction and implementation is wrestled from the the hands Silicon Valley oligarchs and given to democratically elected governments so that regulation can be imposed to promote AI’s sustainability, both in terms of its physical infrastructure and its applications. However, so long as AI remains enmeshed within the power structures responsible for creating the environmental crisis, it will never truly be a force for advancing sustainability.

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The US’s Action Plan to “Prevent Woke AI”

For a few years now, “digital” or “technological” sovereignty has been a prominent topic within AI Ethics and regulatory policies. The challenge being: how can government actors properly rule in the interest of their citizens, while governments (and citizens) must rely on technologies developed by a handful of companies they do not have clear control over? Many efforts to address this challenge consisted either in regulations, such as the EU’s AI Act, or various forms of agreement between (supra)national actors and tech companies.

Unfortunately, the White House’s “America’s AI Action Plan” and the three Executive Orders published on the same day ignore this thorny issue entirely. Instead, these policy proposals aim at deregulating AI development by American Tech companies “to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.” The general thrust is clear: deregulate AI development, promote its deployment across society, and export widely so as to strengthen the U.S.’s global standing.

In advancing these interests, one keyword sticks out like a sore thumb: “Woke AI.” As a millennial, it feels surreal to see a term that I have primarily experienced as Internet lingo make its way into a Presidential Executive Order. While this is far from the first time that the term “woke” has been utilized by the president to pejoratively address the values of the opposition, it’s far from clear what precise danger such language is meant to evoke. What kind of threat does “Woke AI” represent?

The July 23rd Executive Order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” does not attempt to define the term. Instead, it states that AI systems should provide reliable outputs, free from ideological biases or social agendas that might undermine their reliability. In particular, the Order identifies “diversity, identity, and inclusion” (DEI) as a “destructive ideology” that manipulates information regarding race or sex, and incorporates “concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, and systemic racism.” The Order then identifies “Unbiased AI Principles” that will guide development going forward. Chief among these is the command that AI must be truth-seeking and ideologically neutral – “not manipulat[ing] responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI” – to ensure that AI systems are trustworthy.

To many AI ethicists (including myself), the Order reads like a series of non-sequiturs. It demands that tech companies reject any notion related to DEI in their AI development guidelines, yet it is quite unspecific regarding what such rejection would entail in practice. Let us set aside the countless examples of AI systems being unlawfully biased on the basis of race, gender, economic status, and disability in a variety of domains. Let us also set aside the practical impossibility for AI systems to be “unbiased” given that they are technologies literally designed to identify potentially meaningful patterns and sort accordingly. And, finally, let us set aside the irony of the clear ideological grounds motivating the Order’s intention to generate non-partisan results. What little remains when all these difficulties have been accounted for doesn’t amount to much. And it’s worth asking why the focus on “anti-woke AI” represents such a large part of the White House’s overall AI strategy.

The answer to that question becomes much clearer when looking at how – and where – “woke AI” crops up. From the beginning, responsible AI policy is described as integral to the goal of protecting free speech American values. Ultimately, AI outputs must “objectively reflect truth rather than social engineering agendas.” For that reason, references to “misinformation,” regarding things like DEI and climate change, must be removed. But this kind of censorship seems odd considering the stated desire to promote freedom of speech, especially because the Plan is explicitly stating what to not talk about – censoring tech companies from mentioning those topics as relevant concerns.

Ultimately, it often feels like the concern over “Woke AI” is merely a pretense for removing safeguards in order to accelerate AI development. This intent is made explicit at several points of the Plan. At its very introduction (and in reference to the Vice President’s remarks at the AI Action Summit last February) any “onerous” regulation towards AI development would mean paralyzing this technology’s potential – a reason why the current administration rescinded Biden’s “dangerous” Executive Order on AI. (Interestingly enough, many saw that regulation as quite lenient, all things considered, especially compared to the EU’s AI Act.) Any mention of regulation in the Plan that does not originate from the current White House is considered “onerous,” “burdensome,” or in some way unreasonable in slowing down AI development.

Even more poignantly, the Plan is quite clear in its intention to counter Chinese influence: it refers to the governance frameworks proposed by international organizations such as the UN, the G7, and the G20 as “vague ‘codes of conduct’ that promote cultural agendas that do not align with American values, or have been influenced by Chinese companies attempting to shape standards for facial recognition and surveillance.” Safeguards meant to protect individual rights and privacy are written off as the calculated design of the U.S.’s largest geopolitical competitor.

But the Plan is not simply a rhetorical tool to signal dominance within the U.S.’s political discourse. Rather, it is a means of vilifying any obstacle to the “move fast and break things” approach as “woke.” This language is not only meant to clearly separate the current White House’s position from that of their predecessor’s, but to pave the way for deregulation. The fear is that this attitudinal shift cedes far too much power to unaccountable tech companies. Without stronger guardrails in place, we may all get run over.

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Why My Students Shouldn’t Use AI

As the new school year approaches, educators across the country are once more redesigning their classes in light of the brave new world of generative AI. Many teachers are embracing the technology – encouraging their students to make use of this powerful new tool. Some are even going so far as to use AI to assist in their course design. Others, like myself, are banning any use of generative AI in their classes. But why?

Perhaps I’m a luddite. Perhaps I’m no better than Socrates fearing that writing would be the death knell for education. Nevertheless, I think there are (at least) three strong moral arguments against students using AI in a philosophy class – and perhaps education more generally.

Argument 1: AI Harms Creators

Generative AIs like ChatGPT operate on Large Language Models. Put simply, they’re trained on vast quantities of data – usually scraped from what is freely available on the internet. The problem is that this data usually belongs to other people. More problematically, generative AIs make no effort to credit the data that shape their outputs. So, when I use ChatGPT to generate a fluid structure for my paper, or a killer opening paragraph for my opinion piece, there’s no way I can properly credit the sources of those generated outputs. In doing so, I necessarily pass off someone else’s ideas as my own – the very definition of plagiarism.

As our own Tim Sommers notes, a common counter to this argument is that the operation of an LLM isn’t all that different from how our own minds already work: absorbing vast amounts of data, and using that data to produce novel creations. Anyone who’s ever created anything will know the fear that one of your darling creations – a plot point, a song lyric, or a visual design element – is merely parroting another creation once seen, but long forgotten.

Like Sommers, I admit that I lack the expertise to discern how different the operation of LLMs is from how our own minds function. But I think that there is at least one morally important point of difference: While our own creations might be subconsciously informed by data we’ve absorbed, there is (excepting cases of intentional plagiarism) no intention on our part to consciously hold out the work of another as our own. The same isn’t true when we use ChatGPT. We know how LLMs operate, and we know that any product of a generative AI has made vast (unattributed) use of the works of others. This knowledge is, I think, enough to make our actions morally problematic.

Argument 2: AI Harms the Environment

But AI doesn’t just harm creators – it’s also devastating for the environment. Generative AI requires huge amounts of processing power, and that power requires a lot of energy. While precise quantifications are hard to come by, ChatGPT’s power usage is estimated to be roughly equivalent to that of 33,000 standard homes. And it’s not just electricity, either. Generative AIs need vast amounts of water to cool their processors – a concerning prospect, given that we are at imminent risk of a global water crisis.

We are in the throes of a global climate catastrophe – a catastrophe that, according to some estimates, might become irreversible in less than four years if we don’t make drastic changes to our way of living. Among those necessary changes are massive reductions in our energy consumption. Given this, an explosion in the popularity of generative AI is the last thing we need.

Of course, the fact that there is an environmental argument against AI usage doesn’t provide us with an all-things-considered reason to stop. There are many harmful practices that we might need to continue in order to ensure human safety and flourishing. But using AI just doesn’t seem to be among those. Much of our AI usage is entirely frivolous – with 38% of people using AI to plan travel itineraries, and another 25% using it to draft social media posts. And when it comes to non-frivolous functions – like using it to craft an email (as 31% of people have) or prepare for a job interview (as 30% of people have), there are far less environmentally harmful ways of doing the very same thing. Having a question answered by AI can produce almost fifty times the carbon emissions than using a simpler system – like a search engine – to resolve the same query.

Argument 3: AI Harms the User

Even if we’re not motivated to care about creators or the environment, one further fact remains true: AI harms the user. I begin each of my classes by describing philosophy as the discipline that encourages us to think carefully about the reasoning behind our beliefs. This is a challenging – and sometimes terrifying – endeavour, since the discovery of bad reasoning can often force us to abandon some of our most dearly-held beliefs. The subjects I teach require my students to consider some hard questions: Does the climate crisis mean we should have fewer children? Should we permit physician-assisted suicide? Would a Federal ban on TikTok violate our right to freedom of expression? I believe that it’s vitally important that each of us formulate our own answers to such questions. If we farm this out to an algorithm, we’re sort of missing the whole point of philosophy (and education more generally). As Marta Nunes da Costa puts it:

“being reflective – thinking about the reasons why you act and think the way you do – is necessary for fully participating in our social world. Learning is a process through which we form our judgment and in doing so, build our moral identities – who we are and what we value.”

As I’ve argued before, failing to think critically not only risks making us bad humans, but also bad humans. I believe that fact – coupled with the clear harms to creators and the environment – is more than sufficient to explain why my students shouldn’t use AI.

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More Than a Message: Finding Meaning in Sympathy Cards

I suspect having cancer must suck. Indeed, when I think about cancer, my mind instantly runs to terms like “malignant,” “tumor,” “fight,” and “chemotherapy.” All things which one might generously call undesirable. A phrase that doesn’t jump out at me is “funny.” However, Mark Steel’s The Leopard in my House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland is an undeniably funny book.

In it, the author, broadcaster, stand-up comedian, and newspaper columnist recounts the extraordinary year in which he was diagnosed and treated for throat cancer. The book is peppered with vivid, often graphic descriptions of what it’s like when your neck is repeatedly blasted with radiation (expect a lot of talk about mucus). But it’s also filled with warm, witty reflections on his relationships, his fellow cancer patients, his brushes with mortality, and the miraculous feeling of doing something as simple as swallowing water again.

Undoubtedly, all of the above is ripe for philosophical analysis, and this fact isn’t lost on Mark himself. In one chapter of the book, after receiving a recommendation from a fellow cancer sufferer, Mark considers the disease, the effect it’s having on his life, and how one can wrestle with forces beyond one’s control, via Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Taking a stoic approach, he considers the futility of asking “Why me?” or looking for fairness in something as arbitrary as a cancer diagnosis. It’s a grounded, practical perspective — and, I think, a wise one.

Yet, what I want to do here is look past all the fertile philosophical material that Mark provides us in his book and go in on something very specific: sympathy cards.

In Chapter 11, Mark talks about how awkward it can be talking to someone who has cancer. How unsure we often feel about what to say. That uncertainty, he argues, is natural, but it shouldn’t stop us from saying anything at all.

Of course, this transfers to non face-to-face communications. I’m sure you too have faced the daunting task of writing a meaningful message in a card. It might be something as innocuous as a birthday or leaving card, or as substantial as a commiserations or sympathy card. Yet, despite having some vague sense of what you want to say, you don’t know the correct words. This makes the whole thing slightly stressful, and the temptation is there to simply not write in the card at all. To not say anything. This, Mark says, is a mistake:

… here’s my tip if you know someone who lands in a serious medical condition. If you’re not sure what to say to someone, don’t worry because anything you say is better than nothing. I can’t remember the exact words of many of the messages I got, I can only remember that they came. Every email, text or call is a reminder that you matter to someone and that is critical in getting you passed the difficult moments. Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. All the person remembers is that you got in touch.

This, I think, gets at something we often forget when it comes to comforting those who are ill. You’re not expected to craft the perfect, poetic paragraph that lifts someone out of despair. The point of a message, whether text, email, or card, isn’t to fix everything. It’s not even to promise that everything will be okay (because you can’t know that). Rather, it’s to remind the person they haven’t been forgotten. That they’re in your thoughts. That you’ve taken a moment out of your day and dedicated a sliver of your attention to them. That they matter.

These gestures, small as they may seem, speak volumes. They signal that when given the choice between silence and acknowledgement, you chose to say something. And in doing so, you affirmed that their struggle is worthy of notice.

But as I read Mark’s reflections on this, my brain, never missing an opportunity to be pessimistic, conjured a darker scenario: what if the message doesn’t actually come from the person it claims to?

It’s a familiar trope in film and TV: a high-powered executive learns that someone in their office is unwell and tells their assistant to “send a card,” maybe flowers too. Or worse, the executive never finds out at all, and the card is sent by a dutiful underling who signs it on their behalf. In such cases, the card still arrives, and the recipient may still feel touched that someone cared enough to reach out. But on some level, the gesture feels hollow. There’s a subtle, unsettling deception in play: the card wasn’t really from the sender it claims to be. The sentiment was manufactured.

And while the card might still do some good (after all, someone did something), it raises uncomfortable questions. Does intention matter as much as the action itself? Can a false gesture still provide real comfort? Or is there a quiet harm in pretending to care, when the person supposedly sending the message never even knew you were unwell?

These questions seem even more relevant with the advent of easily accessible generative AI. It’s now easy to offload the difficult task of writing a heartfelt message to a tool like ChatGPT. You face the blank space in the card, ask an AI to fill it, and copy the result. To the recipient, it looks like you took the time to write something meaningful. But in reality, you thought of them just enough to delegate the task to a machine.

In that light, the hollowness of the corporate-card trope becomes more personal, more widespread. The authenticity that gives these messages their power starts to erode. Worse, it casts suspicion on the entire genre. If one message might be synthetic, why not all of them?

This unease reminds me of a central theme from Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals. In it, Han argues that our society is losing the shared symbolic acts that once gave meaning to human experience. Rituals, like writing a sympathy card, once required time, presence, and emotional investment. Today, however, many of these acts are reduced to gestures of efficiency, of communication without community. It would seem evident that a card composed by ChatGPT might technically fulfill the form, but it lacks the symbolic weight Han insists is essential. The message becomes a simulation of care, not the thing itself.

Now, I acknowledge that this is a niche worry. And, at least for now, probably an overblown one. Most people still write their own messages, even if they’re clumsy or awkward. And frankly, the awkwardness is part of the point as it shows effort. A messy, imperfect message from a friend is infinitely more valuable than a flawless, ghostwritten one.

But just because it’s niche doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. The emotional stakes are high. As Steel points out, those messages can be a lifeline. They are something to cling to in the middle of immense physical and emotional suffering. They are not just words; they are reminders of human connection. And if we’re not careful, the convenience of automation might start to chip away at that.

What’s the solution, then? Honestly, I don’t have one. But I do know that next time I sit down to write something in a sympathy card, I’ll try not to overthink it. I’ll write something, however clunky or awkward, and trust, as Steel suggests, that the act of writing matters more than the words themselves.

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Grok, Is This True?: Chatbots and Domination

Last week, Grok, the large language model driven AI chatbot from xAI, suddenly began posting… differently. On Tuesday, May 8th, (in posts which xAI has since deleted) Grok stated that “anti-white hate” always comes from individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, claimed that Adolf Hitler would be best suited to solve this problem, and referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”

This follows an incident in May where Grok repeatedly posted about “white genocide” in South Africa while responding to posts on wholly unrelated topics, such as baseball. When asked by users to clarify its posts on “white genocide,” Grok stated that it was instructed by its creators to accept these claims as true.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, announced on Wednesday, July 9th, that she is stepping down. Elon Musk, the owner of both X and xAI, recently wrote that Grok was “too eager to please” and that enabled users to manipulate the chatbot into creating antisemitic posts.

However, this explanation clashes with other information. In June, Musk expressed unhappiness with Grok, declaring that it would be upgraded, targeting a release date around July 4th. On July 5th, xAI posted new lines of code to Grok’s publicly accessible system prompts. This code encouraged Grok to view legacy media are biased, “find diverse sources representing all parties” and “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”

The about Grok page on X states only that it was trained “on a variety of data from publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers.” It is unclear what “well substantiated” claims that “represent all parties” are; given the posts Grok made after changes to its code, it is reasonable to worry that the chatbot’s dataset labels antisemitic conspiracy theorists as a party with well substantiated claims.

There is a sense in which Grok’s posts are philosophically uninteresting. They obviously are morally condemnable. Further, they are not particularly surprising from a sheer informational standpoint. The case bears striking similarities to a Microsoft chatbot called Tay. Microsoft released Tay in 2016, intending for it to learn from its interactions with social media users. Within 24 hours, Microsoft deactivated the bot after it began making racist posts, praising Hitler, and denying the Holocaust.

However, what is interesting about the Grok fiasco is that it illuminates the extent to which creators have influence over AI tools. It seems that just a few additional prompts were able to massively change the content that Grok produced. This is particularly striking given that it appears Grok has been altered strictly to align with Musks’ preferences; new reporting suggests that Grok searches for Musk’s personal views before answering questions on controversial topics.

In a previous column, I discussed the concept of republican freedom. I will give a brief rehash here. Traditionally, philosophers think of freedom in two senses. You have positive freedom when you can do the things that you want to do. In contrast, you have negative freedom when no one actively interferes with your pursuits.

Suppose, for instance, that you are a very strong student and want to attend medical school. However, you lack the money to afford tuition and financial aid is unavailable. You are negatively free as no one is interfering with you. Yet the financial constraints hamper your positive freedom.

Now imagine that a rich uncle offers to pay your tuition. However, this uncle is quite capricious and vengeful; he has a history of lashing out against family members who engage in behavior he finds distasteful, and his preferences are unpredictable. Suppose you accept his offer. Your positive freedom increases as you can attend medical school. But are you wholly free? Your ability to attend medical school depends on your uncle’s preferences. If you do something he dislikes, he may refuse to pay your tuition. In this sense, your uncle dominates you. Even if he never actually rescinds the tuition money, you are still made vulnerable by the fact that he could. The mere threat is enough to reduce your republican freedom. You have republican freedom to the extent that your life’s prospects are not dependent upon the preferences of others. You lack this freedom when others have domineering power over you.

How does this relate to Grok and other AI chatbots? Users are increasingly reliant on these programs. Posters on X regularly ask Grok to verify or explain the claims of others, to the point that it is meme-worthy. Some preface their claims to knowledge with “ChatGPT says that….” Even Google presents an AI overview prior to the actual results. This is deeply troubling given recently released results from an MIT lab which found that users who utilized a large language model in a series of essay-writing tasks appeared to experience neural and cognitive consequences; users of LLMs had weaker neural connectivity, demonstrated lesser cognitive activity while writing, and had worse memory of what they had written than non-users. To quote the researchers:

This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive process required for independent thinking. Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation [and] decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.

As users more frequently rely upon tools like Grok, their ability to research, analyze, and think critically about matters for themselves atrophies. This may make them more dependent on such tools, creating a vicious cycle; they initially use for convenience but over time the use becomes a necessity.

Grok’s recent antisemitic and conspiratorial tilt demonstrates why this potential for dependency is so deeply troubling. The most prominent AI tools are owned by private entities with private interests. As Grok has shown us, it seems that a few minor edits to their core prompts can vastly alter their outputs – the Grok case is simply extreme in both the result and slightness of the prompt modifications. Further, these edits may be the product of the arbitrary preferences of the ownership and programming teams.

This dependency thus seems to reduce the republican freedom of the users. Even if the owners and programmers of these tools never actually alter these tools in a way that misleads the users, the mere potential of their doing so is sufficiently troubling – the users still navigate through the world in a way that depends upon the arbitrary preferences of those who own and program the tools. At any moment the prompts could change, granting those with the ability to alter them a domineering power to shapes the beliefs and fact finding capabilities of those reliant on their programs.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates worries about a relatively new technology: books. He fears that the written word worsens our memory and is less intellectually stimulating than dialogue. In retrospect, Socrates’ criticism is almost laughable. Even if he is right, the benefits of the written word surely far outweigh any cost.

However, there is something different about chatbots and other forms of AI-driven technology that makes the prospect of outsourcing our thinking to them troubling. Specifically, they have changing outputs. As Aaron Schultz argues, AI-driven technology captures our attention effectively because its contents change in real time to satisfy our preferences. But it is not merely the preferences of the users that can change what they see. So long as the owners and programmers may alter the programs to suit their preferences, these tools stand the potential to give those groups domination over us.

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Should We Expect Fairness from AI? The Case of VAR

On the 22nd of June, 1986, God handed a historic victory to the Argentinian soccer team. Argentinian legend Diego Armando Maradona scored the winning goal against England in the World Cup Quarter Finals. Only, he did so with his hand – which, in the game commonly known as football, is not allowed. However, the referee and his team did not see the foul and assigned the goal. This error resulted in a 2-1 victory for the Argentinian team, allowing them to move on to the next bracket of the tournament and, eventually, claim international glory. However, both during and after the game, many others called out the referee’s mistake: due to an error in judgment, he failed to correctly apply the rules of the game, and allowed the Argentinians to win undeservedly. This historical moment, following a cheeky remark from Maradona himself, came to be known as “the Hand of God.”

There is no way around it: human beings, for all their capacity for reason, are fallible. As our intelligence is bound to our physical context, culture, experiences, and our own ideas, some assessments and decisions will be biased, surprisingly influenceable, and, ultimately, unfair.

It is in this department that AI development, well before the days of ChatGPT, claimed to provide an invaluable resource: much more precise and fair assessment than what human beings are capable of. As early as 2012, when the first discussions surrounding “Ethical AI” emerged, a group of researchers at Microsoft developed a framework for developing “Fair AI” – software agents capable of greater fairness in decision-making than human beings could ever hope to achieve.  Emerging technologies are capable of extraordinary tasks: advanced cancer prognosis and treatment, calculating the structure of proteins, and unprecedented support in space exploration – all incredibly complex tasks that human beings simply do not have the capacity to carry out on their own.

However, despite their promise, there have been many, many instances where AI systems were just as unfair as human beings. Cases of AI systems discriminating on the basis of gender, on the basis of race, disability, social class, and income abound. This occurred partly because the data used to develop those systems already reflect unlawful and immoral discriminatory practices carried out by human beings. In the words of philosopher Atoosa Kasirzadeh, AI systems are no help in addressing systemic injustices: if a social system or practice is already biased against a group of people, technology will only reinforce that prejudice. However, I would like to go even further than Kasirzadeh in this regard. We should not expect AI nor technology to make things fairer, as shown in how AI is applied within soccer games – and, specifically, through the technology known as VAR.

VAR, or “Video Assistant Referee,” first introduced in 2016, was designed to more justly apply the rules of football. A referee, due to their epistemic limitations (especially poor positioning within a game), may not be able to assess with certainty whether a foul occurred. Now, officials can review footage of the event from multiple camera angles in order to make that decision. Importantly, the technology underlying VAR is AI-based. Only through an AI system can one find the appropriate footage (which is collected by multiple cameras) for review without interrupting the game for an unacceptably long time. Once again, the sophistication of AI systems’ information processing and accuracy goes far beyond our limited epistemic capacities. So, now that important events in a football game can be reviewed in case of uncertainty, nothing like the backlash following the Hand of God could ever happen again. Right?

Unfortunately, the introduction of VAR has not resolved the issue. Every week the (un)fairness of VAR-assisted decisions is questioned (often by the managers and players themselves), and many websites maintain weekly threads devoted to dissecting footage and discussing calls. Because VAR is simply a tool utilized by the referee, there is still room for significant variation in how the rules are applied.

Take, for instance, the case of Anthony Taylor’s refereeing of the 2023 Europa League final. A supposed handball in favor of AS Roma, which would have led to a penalty kick, was not assigned, in spite of a technically very clear handball. While such a decision did not raise much discussion outside of Italy (and Taylor’s refereeing was praised), the same cannot be said for his identical decision on a nearly identical foul during the European Championship. Put very bluntly: Taylor does not deem that type of handball to be a foul and is consistent in his ruling, while other referees openly disagree. We might be inclined to believe that, because we can record, replay, and ultimately objectify a given event, we can have an objective view of how we should judge that event. However, the act of judgment itself is an inherently subjective act, and even people with the same degree of expertise can interpret the game’s rules differently, and the events they judge differently.

Up until a few years ago, the intentionality of a gesture played a relevant role in the referee’s decision-making: whether a player (apparently) intended to stop a shot towards goal with their hand, or whether it was an accident, mattered for deciding whether to assign the foul or not. However, following the introduction of VAR, the rules have been revised in several countries: many countries changed such a rule so that any handball in the penalty area – accident or not – results in a penalty kick. (The slight difference in rules across different national and international competitions is itself a source of confusion and variation that complicates the picture even further.) Similarly, while the way of judging whether a player stomping on another’s foot used to be judged as foul depending on perceived intentionality and gravity of the stomp – depending on whether, e.g., the toes or the ankle were stomped – now all stomps are treated the same. These rule changes make sense considering how VAR shifts referees’ focus from an event on the pitch to images on a camera. When using the VAR, the referee is not judging a dynamic interaction between players, where the greater context and movement of the game makes it easier to assess what players’ intentions might be. When judging a sequence of frames, considering the intentionality of players’ actions becomes incredibly more complicated. In other words, VAR is not making the game of soccer better: in order to make VAR work, it is necessary to change the rules. AI is also not making things fairer: the rules must still be applied in accurate and equitable ways.

This might still appear to be something quite minute in the grand scheme of things: a change of rules in a mere game, no matter how popular it may be. However, the core issue regards what we understand fairness to be, what actually AI needs from us in order to make things supposedly fairer. In theory, AI can make things fair because it can follow and apply the rules and the norms that human beings often fail to apply, due to their own epistemic limitations. However, in order to purposefully and efficiently implement AI within a social context, we need to tweak and change the rules of that social context – not in the name of fairness, but in the name of efficiency. Before AI can arguably make things fairer for our society, we need to change our society first, to merely make it possible to implement AI in the first place. For this reason, it is worth asking ourselves whether AI is making things fairer for us, or whether we are making things easier for AI.

We can expect some revolutionary uses of AI in many domains, and potentially even great benefits for society. However, quite often AI technologies are promoted as morally valuable – more trustworthy, more responsible, more fair. In some cases, that can be true: VAR has proved successful in detecting fouls; so much so that it is almost unimaginable that something like the Hand of God could happen again. However, to use AI and take advantage of its precision within a given social context, it is often necessary to change the rules and norms that define the context in order to use AI in the first place. We can expect more precision from AI, as a technical value; however, precision does not equal fairness. Rather,  the rules determining what is fair can – and should – only come from us – what we believe, what we do, and what we value.

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Should You Thank Your AI?

In late April, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, made waves with a response to a question about the financial and environmental cost of saying “please” and “thank you” when interacting with Artificial Intelligence — “Tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know.” The practice is common, with over two-thirds of users observing such social niceties when asking AI questions, according to a February survey. Altman may simply be preaching the power of politeness, but it could be for reasons that are anything but common.

Is Altman right? Should we thank ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek and the other AI chatbots out there? Can ethics give us any guidance?

Entities that we do not believe need to behave ethically themselves, but should be subject to moral considerations, are generally called “moral patients.” We tend to think they have lesser (but still some) moral status. For example, we do not expect newborns and animals to behave ethically, but we often adopt certain moral standards in regard to their treatment.

But current Large Language Models, the umbrella under which tools like ChatGPT fall, are not good contenders to be moral patients. There is considerable complexity in debates about AI consciousness, when it might happen, and how we would know. Nonetheless, we are not there yet.  While current AI chatbots has been trained on vast amounts of date to emulate human speech and behavior, as yet, experts assert that they have no consciousness, no inner life, they are not in control of their actions, and they cannot suffer or feel pain. (Some of these matters have been previously discussed in The Prindle Post.)

Absent characteristics like consciousness or even the ability to be offended, there seems to be no special reason to treat AI chatbots politely based on the kind of thing that they are.

Altman’s response, however, suggests another kind of concern. We may have consequentialist worries — an ethical analysis based on the consequences of our actions — about saying please and thank you to AI chatbots. Each additional “token,” a chunk of characters, that the AI has to analyze in a question costs energy. Accordingly, adding polite words to questions both costs AI companies money and, of more direct ethical relevance, causes environmental damage. Prominent AI tools like ChatGPT need incredible amounts of electricity and water for cooling.

If we are interested in limiting the harms our actions cause, then reducing energy waste and environmental damage through being less polite with AI chatbots may make sense. Although stripping off a word or two has nowhere near the energy saving impact as, say, not asking the question at all, or simply using a standard internet search instead which costs ten times less energy.

Altman’s “you never know” however hints at another worry. We may be polite to an AI out of fear that it is actually conscious, or even, that the AI overlords are coming soon and it is in our own interest to be nice. This motivation echoes the famous Pascal’s wager in philosophy.

The 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that we should behave as if god exists. For if god exists, but we do not believe, then we suffer an eternity of misery and miss out on an eternity of bliss. The wagers provide no evidence for the existence of god one way or the other, but rather holds that believing in god and behaving accordingly is the safest bet. (There are a number of commonly seen objections.)

By similar reasoning, we might assert that even though the chances of ChatGPT being secretly conscious, or turning into an all-powerful overlord, are extremely small, the potential harms are so serious that we should nonetheless act if it could be the case — especially for relatively low-cost actions like saying “please” and “thank you.” It does somewhat notably depart from Pascal’s wager in that the consequences are merely very bad, and not infinitely bad, and therefore can be outweighed by other more likely concerns. In fact, given the tiny likelihoods involved, and the probably minimal impact that saying “please” and “thank you” will have, there is likely not a compelling probabilistic argument about avoiding serious (if rare) consequences at all.

However,  how we treat AI is not just about AI, it is about ourselves. The philosopher Immanuel Kant made a famously strict moral framework in which only actors possessing a certain kind of rationality, like humans, deserved moral consideration. Unsettlingly, even for those in the 1700s, this implied that we have no moral considerations towards animals. Kant’s response to this concern was that we owe it to ourselves to treat animals well. We injure our moral selves, when we ignore compassion, or an animal in pain. It becomes easier to slide into callousness with humans.

Whether Kant gives animals enough due is a matter of debate, but regardless, the same concern applies with AI. If we want to embrace a general ethos that treats people with dignity and respect when we make requests of them, then we should stay in practice when dealing with superficially human-like AI.

There is potentially a dark side to this argument about AI chatbots. Their very human-likeness can be a problem. Already, there are cases of people losing themselves to delusional relationships with  ChatGPT, or trusting chatbots uncritically. The scope of this problem is not yet clear, but perhaps we do not want to aspire to a very human-like relationship with the technology at all, but instead have a well-delineated set of norms and practices for engaging with these chatbots. We may want to adopt norms that avoid anthropomorphizing them.

Large Language Models are still new. Ethical analysis, especially ethical analysis based on the potential consequences of treating AI a certain way, is correspondingly young. This is even true for seemingly minor issues like saying “please” and “thank you.” It also speaks to a broader challenge with AI. The technology is already changing the world. It is good to consider how AI will change society — what jobs will it replace, what problems will it solve, what kind of surveillance will it enable, how much energy will it use? But we also need to consider its moral impact. What will AI do to our ethical selves?