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Discussion thread: AI Ethics! New episode is up! (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-08 18:14:10
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Will AI crash out? AI Ethicology episode is published! Did you listen? What did you think?

Will AI save the world? Kill us all? What happens when it uses artists' work without permission? Who is babysitting it? Let's chat with Cognitive scientist, Trinity College professor and Artificial Intelligence Ethicologist  Dr. Abeba Birhane.

We talk about so much good stuff: environmental impacts, booby traps, doorbell narcs, commonly used fallacies, how the “godfathers’ of AI feel about their creation, robots doing your homework, and and whether or not AI is actually the root of all evil. Also: bacon ice cream and why Siri is a girl.

Let's chat about the episode!

A real person,

Ol' Popward

Files

Artificial Intelligence Ethicology (WILL A.I. CRASH OUT?) with Dr. Abeba Birhane - alie ward

Who's babysitting AI? Will it steal your job? What happens when you're rude to a chatbot? Cognitive scientist, Trinity College professor and Artificial Intelligence Ethicologist Dr. Abeba Birhane lets me ask her not-smart questions about legislation around AI, auditing datasets, environmen

Comments

Melissa Quinn

I feel like the things this guest found to be reassuring were...not actually particularly reassuring. AI needs humans now because it has such a high error rate, but for how much longer will that be true? It doesn't have any desires or wants, but it's an increasingly powerful tool available to humans who DO have desires and wants. I dunno man, it was an interesting listen but she seemed overly sunny about potential problems.

Andy Pepper

My Siri has always been an Australian man, and as a (queer) American man, I find that significantly more delightful. Settings - Siri - Voice 😜

Ben Pollock

Oh man, I wish I had seen the announcement for this episode while questions were being presented! I’m a sociology professor and I was actually just discussing this EXACT topic with my students today!

Alie Ward

What about? Did they have any thoughts? I hope we addressed some of the topics on y'alls minds

Alie Ward

I'm afraid if I ever go to Australian I will not return. The accents. Swoon.

Alie Ward

I mean, I FEEL YA. But also she is SUCH an expert in this so maaaybe it will crash out? Honestly, all of the self-regulations being totally abandoned by corporations is just fucking awful.

Moo

AI won't kill us all until we set the wrong alignment, or until the terrible humans that control/promote their AI use it and the data it gathers to kill us all. Remember disasterology and the paperclip problem, if you forget to mention Asimov's Three Laws then "make the most paperclips" to an AI will optimize the wrong thing precisely because it has no feelings or any malice. Roko's Basilisk is also "fun" to consider, but an easy idea to counter with the same Matrix-esque "efficiency" arguments (humans are TERRIBLE batteries).

Hannah Gorrie

Dr. Birhane is such a delight, I loved this episode despite being sick of thinking about AI 🙄 there are a lot of initiatives at my job around finding ways AI can help us at work. I have so many new questions based on her answers, I wish we could have a follow up episode.

Hannah Gorrie

My Google assistant is set to a British lady and I'm convinced she's become snottier to me over time 😂

Hannah Gorrie

I really appreciated her point that we need to recognize that science fiction is *fiction* and why AI can't become sentient. Lay people (me) might not have a realistic understanding of what AI is and isn't, hence the fears. But yes, here's another tool that can be wielded by bad actors

Elinor Wahl

Asimov's 'Three Laws' actually create more problems than they solve, as every story that revolves around them illustrates - and strangely, Asimov never seemed to understand that in interviews, despite constructing so many plots in which the stress cases reveal that the entire system is unworkable. Ultimately, you can't make morality out of oversimplified building blocks

Elinor Wahl

It may not be accurate to assume that AI will never be a self-determined actor - plants and jellyfish make decisions and demonstrate learning despite having no centralized brains, so clearly humans overestimate how complex a system needs to be to achieve self-determined action

Elinor Wahl

Are you doing okay, Alie? The comments interjected in the editing made you sound incredibly stressed

Moo

Yeah, that shows the problem way better than I could explain. Without any explicit Don't Be Evil overarching rule, or even with the wrong version of it, things aren't going to work out well for us. I doubt humanity even knows how to encode that in any coherent way. We're lucky that AI is so bad at its job for now, Boston Dynamics robots still fall over or get stuck in dumb situations, and ChatGPT can barely remember the last thing you told it.

Alie Ward

Ha, thank you for asking! IT'S A STRESSFUL TOPIC! I try to stay optimistic at all times and celebrate the beauty when I can, but like most of inhabitants of planet Earth lately (especially half of America) shit is STRESSFUL. Do you live in the US? I'm so curious how the rest of the world is feeling right now.

Alie Ward

Oh that's great that it sparked new ways of questioning and looking at it!

Elinor Wahl

I live in the United States too, but based on my own experiences as a traumatized child growing up with harmful misdiagnosis, I see the current period of upheaval as mostly an externalization of topics - and prejudices - that were quietly stifled before, and kept to the margins of society. The fear of AI has existed for a very long time, and the way it's expressed hasn't changed at all from the way it was when I was 9 years old and reading about these topics. The intellectual theft portion of the fear is an extension of outrage over how much power people with money can exercise over those without, and how they can hoard resources; and the 'AI slop' portion of the fear is also an argument for why poor generative AI results are self-limiting, because a bad system can't be sustained. As for the energy consumption - where is this anxiety over how much energy the internet consumes even without AI functioning?

Ian

This was a great episode! Thanks for asking Dr. Birhane my question (our question, lots of people had it) about jobs. Until recently I was a federal employee, and now that I don't have my career I'm not sure what comes next. I can get into a panic thinking that AI is going to take every job I've ever wanted, especially since I've always secretly wanted to become a professional illustrator. I wonder if something like "support a human" will become a thing like "buy local." I'm still scared of AI, but it's comforting to hear from intelligent, real people, even if what they say is not completely reassuring. I can't speak for outside the US, but I can say I've been more consistently stressed these last few months than I've ever been, and every little bit of positivity helps. Thanks for the work you do Alie!

Jen Clinton

South African Siri-lady over here! :D

Alie Ward

what kind of illustration do you do? If you have an Instagram or website link you want to share, I bet a lot of us would love to see!

Elinor Wahl

Absolutely none of this is meant to downplay your concerns, of course

Gnome Anne (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-06 05:00 I thought it was funny how literal the guest was answering questions. I’m autistic, so I would have answered “will AI steal our jobs?” similarly, but from the aside it seems like you really had broader concerns about AI stealing the *humanity* from our jobs and while I think her answer to the literal question was good, it was a very disheartening answer to the second question. I feel like I’m being changed from a knowledge worker who is thoughtful and curious to someone chasing a malfunctioning roomba around all day, and it sucks! I don’t want to be an AI babysitter 😞 I also really appreciated how emphatic she was about how much of the hype of AIs inherent capacity for good or evil is exaggerated. Like, we’re not going to get a spontaneous singularity, and also it’s not going to make everything work better. It’s code and we need to treat it like a tool, not like a hurricane. It’s something to be COLLECTIVELY thoughtful and careful with, not some force of nature beyond our control.
2025-05-09 23:19

Eliot

Australian Siri lady here. I wish I could set it by task. I'd have a German male for alarms/timers. I would jump to action. 😉

Ian

Oh, thank you, but I'm not that organized and my stuff isn't professional quality (yet!). Maybe it's time to start taking my work more seriously and build up a portfolio. I guess I may as well try to do what I want even if AI will make it that much harder to make a living. Is having a collection of art online still really the way to go though, if AI is just going to snatch it up? Could someone create a website where someone could show their creative stuff and keep AI out?

Chayva Lehrman

I love Ologies but found this one often frustrating, in part because Dr. Birhane framed some scary things in an overly sunny/minimizing way (e.g., 0% chance of existential threat), and on the other hand, disparaged AI’s abilities/potential by shifting the focus back to AI errors and alarmism. An example of the latter was her point about how water cooling is taking water from households because it can’t be saltwater - why frame that only as “AI is terrible again and again” rather than “Since the systems need coolant, companies and nonprofits should promote the use of gray water”? Since almost every answer looped back to doomsday, I felt like Dr. Birhane might’ve been caught in the academic version of tabloids: one’s research and talks get more attention if they scare or upset people, rather than educate.

Claudius

it's not the ologist's task to suggest stuff in a podcast that nobody does. Currently fresh water is the way everybody does it. Why sugarcoat that?

Claudius

In a vast see of people exaggerating what "AI" can do, I found this episode very refreshing. I've been following this topic closely for over a decade and I would like to say: this episode turned out great! One can't seriously talk about the current technologies and applications (mostly LLMs) without acknowledging energy use, copyright infringement and the utter lack of correctness in the generated output.

Hannah Johnson

The "support a human" thing is kind of already happening. For example, on a site where I buy puzzles (Puzzedly) you can select "No-AI puzzles" from the menu to only see puzzles featuring real art by real people. Encouraging that they have the option, but a bummer that we have to select that. I do think a lot of companies are feeling the pressure to let us opt-out of AI stuff, but whether or not most of them give into that pressure remains to be seen.

Clemens V

Definitely. If there is a god. It definitely listens too. Cause it’s the coolest thing to do

Chayva Lehrman

I hear you that she’s pointing out the issues, and though suggesting ideas for policy or activism might be nice, that’s a different area - plus it would be unreasonable to expect an idea in response to every single issue. Putting the example I chose aside, my primary frustration was how Dr. Birhane minimized some things that my other reading has said are great risks, and also claimed that other things are non-issues when I think they’re quite serious.

Chayva Lehrman

If you’re interested in another perspective on AI (though this is more focused on geopolitics than Birhane’s focus on ethics), this essay might interest you https://ai-2027.com/

LesLee

Excellent episode!

Organic Free-Range Lily

Humans are terrible batteries, but also very very ironic ones. ;) Like a novelty gadget you'd keep on your desk: an absolute waste of electricity, but it's amusing.

Organic Free-Range Lily

I liked this episode, and Dr. Birhane is amazing, but... As a writer, this is absolute nightmare fuel. The best-case scenario for writers would be to work less hours, for Kenya-level wages, to proofread the AI's output? 😱 That sounds like the prelude to the Butlerian Jihad, right there. Down with the thinking machines! 😈 Direct quotes: "So, a writer might be, your hours might be reduced, and you might be getting paid less, and your company might be bringing AI to kind of do the bulk of the job. But still, you can't put out the raw outputs because most of the time it's not even legible. So, the role of writers and artists and journalists and so on becomes more of a babysitter for AI, verifying the information that's been put out, kind of ensuring it makes sense, and so on." & "Humans will always remain at the heart of AI. The minute human involvement ceases, the minute AI stops operating because AI is human through and through, as I said. From the data that's gathered from humans and so much work goes into data preparation, data annotation, cleaning up the data, detoxifying the data. And unfortunately, a lot of these tasks are allocated to the developing world. So, you have a lot of data workers in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Ethiopia, in India, for example, that really do the dirty work of AI."

Jeanette-o-saur

So the encryption in WhatsApp is meaningless? 😕

Melody Taylor

Yeah, that snippet didn't fill me with a lot of hope about the role of AI in human creative pursuits.

Anna

i bought a subscription to patreon just so i can ask alie if a topic on AI-induced psychosis may be considered?? i’m listening to this episode and i would love to understand how AI might be affecting our psyches. anyways, great episode! 😊