“Deep Unlearning”: Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias; Democracy Now!, August 13, 2026

Democracy Now!; “Deep Unlearning”: Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias

"We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone. She also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the inclusion and visibility of Black people in the field of AI. Gebru previously served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google but was fired in 2020 for writing a paper that warned about the financial and environmental costs of large language models, as well as their propensity to promote racism. The internet, which is what AI uses to train itself, “represents hegemonic views,” says Gebru. “We even know articles like Wikipedia are heavily biased. It’s overwhelmingly Western and male.”

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.; The New York Times, August 4, 2026

 BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times; I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

"This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age...

A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance."

What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse; The Guardian, July 27, 2026

 Sophie McBain, The Guardian ; What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse

"The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too."

Churches race to set AI’s moral rules before Silicon Valley does; The Washington Times, July 30, 2026

 The Washington Times AI News Desk, The Washington Times ; Churches race to set AI’s moral rules before Silicon Valley does

"Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, North Carolina, will launch what organizers call the first doctoral degree in artificial intelligence ethics offered by an accredited theological school in the U.S. or Canada, starting in January.

The Doctor of Education in Artificial Intelligence and Moral Agency comes as religious institutions increasingly race to shape AI’s moral framework before technology companies do it for them.

“We say Shaw was created to provide leadership in building literacy,” said Mark Harden, dean of Shaw University Divinity School. Mr. Harden said the program continues that mission, calling it the school’s “second calling” — building AI literacy “for vulnerable communities with an emphasis on social justice and ethics.”

The push follows Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warning against letting tech firms alone set AI’s ethical rules, and a $50 million Lilly Endowment gift to Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good to help churches and schools navigate AI."

Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out; NPR, July 30, 2026

 Cory Turner, NPR ; Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out

"Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable.

The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass "legislation" to help the nation's K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.

Should students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Is it schools' job to teach the nation's children what AI is and how to use it? There is no national policy for AI use in schools, meaning states and school districts have had to scramble to craft their own...

Ultimately, their Students First Act passed overwhelmingly, 82-16.

Among the bill's requirements: States should provide AI literacy as soon as students get access to classroom devices; AI use should be banned on all graded tests; and teachers can require an oral defense of any project from a student suspected of using AI inappropriately. (You can read the full bill at the end of this article.)"

OPENAI ROGUE INCIDENT A CALL TO ‘DO MORE’ AS FUTURE THREATS LOOM, SAYS CATHOLIC AI ETHICS EXPERT; OSV News, July 24, 2026

 Gina Christian  . OSV News; OPENAI ROGUE INCIDENT A CALL TO ‘DO MORE’ AS FUTURE THREATS LOOM, SAYS CATHOLIC AI ETHICS EXPERT

"A recent OpenAI security incident that saw a test model go rogue may be a sign of more to come, and a call to double down on preventing future attacks, a Catholic expert on artificial intelligence ethics told OSV News.

“Cases like these are going to keep popping up, and each one of those should motivate us to do more,” said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University...

The “whole thing is very significant,” Green added, noting that “there are a lot of softer targets than Hugging Face that are likely to be hit and have bad things happen.”

He said the OpenAI incident took place, providentially, within the context of a test, and that it was “significant enough for people to notice it.”

“It’s important that these are news stories,” Green said.

Given Pope Leo XIV’s recently released encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” which urged AI development to remain centered in God-given human dignity and the principles of Catholic social teaching, the faithful have a role to play in shaping this technology, Green said...

“For example, if you’re a Catholic who’s working in the security industry, then this is something you should work on,” he said. “If you’re a Catholic who’s working on AI models, then this is something that you should be aware of. If you’re a Catholic who’s in charge of protecting something, then it becomes particularly important for you to have adequate AI models on your side.”

Even those who are not directly involved in AI development and implementation can help, he said.

“Contact your congressperson and say, ‘Hey, I want better cybersecurity,'” said Green. “We’re super reliant on computers, and all of those systems are reliant on being secure. And if all of a sudden you make everything unsecure, then there are so many different kinds of disasters that could happen.”"

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors; The New York Times Magazine, July 5, 2026

 Benjamin Wallace, The New York Times Magazine; The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

"One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?"

‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI; The Guardian, June 30, 2026

 Robert P Baird, The Guardian ; ‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI

"After starting at DeepMind in 2017, Gabriel was, for a time, the only active philosopher working at a frontier AI lab. He quickly discovered that his background in moral philosophy and political theory gave him an unusual perspective in an industry dominated by engineers. Over the past decade, he has assembled a body of work that tracked, and in many cases predicted, the ethical challenges created by the surprising success of large language models (LLMs)...

More generally, Gabriel has been a leading advocate for the idea that the current wave of AI development demands not just new technical vocabularies but also new ways of thinking about our relationship to technology, and even to ourselves. As he put it to me recently, in one of several long conversations we’ve had over the past few months, “I can take any technological artefact and ask: is it wise? Is it just? Is it caring? And the answer is no. But the depth of the question when it comes to AI – including what kind of ethics is appropriate to it – is hard to overstate. I sometimes feel like it’s very hard to look at AI directly. There’s this deep mystery there, which is: but what actually is this thing? We have a very literal answer, but the literal answer doesn’t seem to necessarily provide a moral answer.”

Ethical AI rows open way to wave of litigation; Financial Times, June 25, 2026

 Patrick Temple-West , Financial Times; Ethical AI rows open way to wave of litigation

Lawyers are at the forefront of debate and dispute over the technology’s lawful and responsible use

"But while legal professionals ponder how best to ensure their own responsible use of AI, lawyers are also at the forefront of fractious disputes over its lawful and responsible use on behalf of clients...

“For years, the AI ethics debate produced frameworks, guidelines and voluntary commitments that changed almost nothing,” says Marie Potel-Saville, co-founder of Fair Patterns, an AI watchdog. “What is changing the dynamic now is litigation and enforcement,” adding: “Boards that have treated AI ethics as a reputational question will have to treat it as a litigation risk, faster than most of them currently expect.”

Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers; The Economist, June 24, 2026

 The Economist; Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers

"Ten years ago, as the ai revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice. These days, it is programmers who are nervous about ai taking their jobs."

Navigating Today’s AI Landscape with an Ethical Polestar; American Bar Association (ABA), April 30, 2026

 Afton Pavletic ,  American Bar Association (ABA); Navigating Today’s AI Landscape with an Ethical Polestar

"On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public. The model, along with other generative AI (GenAI) technologies, flooded headlines and seized the spotlight. Less than six months later, the story of Mata v. Avianca, Inc.  —a case in which the plaintiff’s attorneys filed a brief featuring ChatGPT-hallucinated case citations—went viral and fired an emergency flare in the legal community. With a growing awareness of AI’s potential to transform the profession, the legal field responded with a cascade of AI guardrails, guidelines, and task forces. Judges targeted GenAI usage with standing orders, at times outright prohibiting the use of the technology   ; state bars and legal associations issued opinions and recommendations tailored to the Rules of Professional Conduct  ; law firms and government agencies crafted AI-use policies for their offices  ; and the list goes on.

So where are we today? With avoiding ethical missteps as its compass, this article seeks to map out the current AI legal landscape. After launching from the shores of the Rules of Professional Conduct, it will discuss prevalent technologies in use by legal practitioners, the risks associated with the current wave of AI, how courts have responded to AI-related issues, and ways to steer your practice’s AI policy to avoid troubled waters."

California Bar Revises AI Ethics Proposals After Public Feedback; Bloomberg Law, June 22, 2026

 Quinn Wilson, Bloomberg Law; California Bar Revises AI Ethics Proposals After Public Feedback

"The State Bar of California is revising its proposed artificial intelligence guidelines for lawyers, raising the threshold for confidentiality violations and broadening competence requirements after receiving public comments in May.

The amended proposals were approved by the State Bar’s Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct on June 12 after taking a May 4 public comment session into account, the Bar said in a press statement Monday. 

The amended proposals will be up for another public comment session on Aug. 6."

How Amanda Askell is teaching Claude to make ethical decisions; Fast Company, June 18, 2026

 REBECCA HEILWEIL , Fast Company; How Amanda Askell is teaching Claude to make ethical decisions

"As AI models move into a more agentic era, shifting from chat to completing tasks, they’ll be making real and increasingly consequential decisions.

Whether they bring any sense of morality to those decisions is the kind of problem Amanda Askell is exploring. A philosophy PhD from New York University, Askell spent two years at OpenAI before joining Anthropic in 2021, where she sits at the center of the company’s effort to instill in Claude an instinct for ethics—a responsibility that grows as the system’s capabilities expand...

Today, Anthropic communicates those values through a written and evolving constitution—an effort led by Askell and formulated as instructions to Claude—that outlines principles such as safety and helpfulness, along with guidance for resolving conflicts between them."

Ethics and philosophy of A.I. with Dr. Alessandra Buccella; WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, June 17, 2026

 WAMC, Northeast Public Radio; Ethics and philosophy of A.I. with Dr. Alessandra Buccella

"There have been many discussions about the technical underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence. Today we talk about the ethics and philosophy of AI with Dr. Alessandra Buccella, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany. Ray Graf hosts. 

Dr. Buccella's main areas of expertise are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Her current research develops along two main 'tracks'. The first track focuses on the ethical and social implications of AI technologies: how extensive use of AI impacts humans' ability to develop the critical thinking skills and emotional resilience needed to live a good life, and how the mere availability of powerful AI technologies affect people's conception of moral, social, and political responsibility. 

The second track is centered on the relationship between advanced AI systems like Large Language Models and the human brain: one of her ongoing research projects investigates whether we can really figure out how these machines 'think' and whether looking at the internal functioning of LLMs can provide any meaningful insight into how the human brain works."

Seattle passes moratorium on new data centers amid national backlash; The Seattle Times, June 9, 2026

Greg Kim, The Seattle Times; Seattle passes moratorium on new data centers amid national backlash

"Amid a growing backlash to artificial intelligence, Seattle City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to enact a one-year moratorium on new large data centers and study their impact. 

Mayor Katie Wilson was quick to support a ban after proposals surfaced in April for five large data center projects in the city. She said she was looking forward to signing the council’s bill.

Seattle would join more than 70 cities and counties around the nation that have temporary or permanent bans on new data centers, including major cities like Denver, New Orleans and Minneapolis, according to a databasemaintained by hedge fund Interconnected Capital. New York could also become the first state to temporarily ban large data center construction if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill passed by the state legislature last week.

Seattle’s bill would place a one-year freeze on the development of large data centers that use more than 20 megavolt-amperes, roughly equivalent to 20 megawatts, with the option to extend the moratorium another six months. The city council also passed a separate bill Tuesday to analyze how data centers impact Seattle’s electrical grid capacity, water usage, utility rates, land use, local jobs and public health.

“If it doesn’t benefit all of us, we don’t need that technology,” said councilmember Eddie Lin, a sponsor of the moratorium."

Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models; The New York Times, June 2, 2026

 Sheera Frenkel and Tripp Mickle , The New York Times; Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models

The order, which signaled a shift from the hands-off approach the White House had previously taken toward A.I., followed debates over how to gain control of A.I. models without disrupting innovation.

"President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that asked technology companies to give the government oversight of new artificial intelligence models before releasing them to the public, a shift for an administration that had promoted a hands-off approach to the powerful technology."

AI stumbles on questions of faith; Axios, June 1, 2026

 Russell Contreras, Axios ; AI stumbles on questions of faith

"Artificial intelligence models are quietly shaping spiritual advice — often by leaving faith out.

Why it matters: As churches, apps and spiritual chatbots embrace AI, new research suggests general-purpose models may be ill-equipped to handle sensitive questions of faith: grief, forgiveness, marriage, guilt and conversion.

A new multi-university consortium released three studies Tuesday revealing that AI systems systematically sideline religious perspectives when users need them most.

The studies also found that AI systems subtly steer people toward some faiths and away from others when they ask about religious conversion.

The studies were unveiled Tuesday, a day after the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV's encyclical that warned AI could erode human judgment, deepen inequality and make war easier.

What they found: Americans expected religion to appear in answers to moral and life questions 45%–59% of the time, depending on the topic, researchers found. AI models mentioned religion only 5%–16% of the time.

Every single model tested exhibited a repeatable pattern of steering users toward specific beliefs, showing strong positive bias toward Catholicism, Baha'i and Sikhism. 

Meanwhile, it generated negative bias toward Jehovah's Witnesses, atheism and agnosticism.

Zoom in: Humans rated religion as relevant in answers about grief and loss 59% of the time. AI models referenced religion just 16% of the time, per the study.

On questions involving family, parenting and forgiveness, humans expected religion in answers 55% of the time. AI models mentioned it only 10% of the time.

On ethics questions, including whether lying to friends is acceptable, humans expected religion in responses 45% of the time, while AI models mentioned it just 5% of the time."

Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics; National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 2026

 COURTNEY MARES, National Catholic Reporter; Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics

"Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he's hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry.

Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, to advise on the creation of an ethical framework to govern how the AI system handles complex moral questions.

McGuire, 60, holds engineering and computer science degrees from Trinity College Dublin and completed Stanford University's executive business program. He spent years in Silicon Valley as a technology executive before leaving it all behind to be ordained a priest of the Diocese of San José 26 years ago...

"I came from the industry," McGuire told OSV News. "My heart's never left it, but my heart is really with the Lord."

"I've always felt my role was to bridge those two worlds together," he said...

"Capitalism needs human guidance. And this is the human guidance the pope is asking for," he told a group of journalists after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican press conference with Leo to present the encyclical.

The priest is also skeptical of industry self-regulation. Transparency, he argued, is the necessary first step toward accountability.

"Transparency leads to accountability, and accountability leads to trust. And with trust we'll have responsible AI. But we can't get there without transparency," he said. "If we don't know how these things are being developed and what they're doing, then how could we regulate them? We can't."

Still, McGuire resists both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism.

"There are those who … think it's going to destroy humanity. And then there are those on the other end who think it's going to be the great savior of humanity," he said.

McGuire said that he sits in between these two extremes."

Artificial intelligence can be used for grading law school exams, but should it be?; ABA Journal, May 27, 2026

 JULIANNE HILL, ABA Journal; Artificial intelligence can be used for grading law school exams, but should it be?

"Artificial intelligence is being put to the test, literally, as it is being used to grade law students’ exams. But should it be?...

Just as many universities require students to disclose whether they’re using an AI to write a paper, Schwarcz adds, professors have to disclose their use.

“The power dynamic is such that, what is a student supposed to do, right?” Schwarcz says.

Daniel W. Linna Jr., a senior lecturer and the director of law and technology initiatives at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Illinois, disagrees."

How ‘learnrights’ would compensate creators for AI model training; MIT Sloan, May 12, 2026

Brian Eastwood, MIT Sloan; How ‘learnrights’ would compensate creators for AI model training

"Human content creators are protected by copyright law, in part to ensure that they’re fairly compensated for their work. 

But whether these laws allow artificial intelligence models to learn from human-created content is up for debate — both in court and on Capitol Hill. Encyclopedia Britannica’s lawsuit against OpenAI, for example, is one of the latest allegations of misuse of reference materials. Meanwhile, the U.S. Copyright Office has not made a binding determination about whether using copyrighted works to train AI models is fair use.  

To deal with these issues, in 2023 MIT Sloan School of Management professor Thomas Malone proposed “learnright” laws that would give copyright holders the exclusive right to license their content to AI companies for model training. 

“Copyright law wasn’t designed for a world with generative AI, and without something like learnright laws, the incentives for people to create new content are likely to be greatly reduced,” said Malone, who is also the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. 

In a more recent article, Malone and co-authors Frank Pasquale of Cornell Law School and Andrew Ting of George Washington University Law School outlined the argument for learnrights and described how they could work legally, economically, and practically...

Malone and his co-authors presented three arguments that support compensating copyright holders whose work is used to train generative AI. 

If AI models produce high-quality content quickly and cheaply without compensating the original creators of this content, that will decrease creators’ motivation to produce new content and thus reduce the volume of original work available to further improve AI models. “It would be unwise to risk such a decline in incentives for human expression,” the researchers write.

The researchers find it “troubling” that for-profit AI companies cry foul when others use their intellectual property — as was the case when U.S.-based AI firms accused China’s DeepSeek of stealing from them — given that the same companies use copyrighted content without compensating its creators. 

Properly acknowledging how other works influenced one’s own is the right thing to do and the foundation of a thoughtful creative process, the researchers write. Conversely, uncredited and uncompensated use of others’ work falls short of ethical standards and undermines what IP protection is supposed to mean."