Simon Coghlan

Sometimes criticism of vets is unfair – and harmful. But a new book urges us to reflect deeply on ethics in veterinary services. @CoghSimon @unimelb theconversation.com/big-bills-fur-…

Veterinarians are sometimes ethically criticised for over-servicing, over-charging, and ending animal lives too early or too late. In this book review for The Conversation, I explore these issues. #Vetmed #AnimalEthics #VetEthics #Bioethics theconversation.com/big-bills-fur-…

Should AI ethics guidelines include animals? They don't (usually) but they should, we argue in this new paper: #AIethics #animalethics ......link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Falling for AI fakes is can be bad. Wrongfully accusing people of using AI can be a problem too. @ConversationEDU @lucysparrowdrag Our Conversation article on this is out today: theconversation.com/distrust-in-ai…

Even if you suspect a fake, here's what to consider before accusing someone of using AI to create art, music or writing. @CoghSimon @unimelb theconversation.com/distrust-in-ai…

Can animals have privacy? What could that mean, and how might digital technology affect it? My short reply piece with with Adam Cardilini explores these questions. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

My PhD student Stella Yuan has a paper OUT in CHI on ethics of care, tech, and older adults in aged care dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.11…

New paper on animal dignity 🫏 in Philosophy Compass. Do animals have dignity? What does that mean for how we should treat them? I outline four possible types: dignity related to inherent worth, flourishing nature, social status, and honour. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ph…

@DarrinADurant @David_Gunkel ...partly because 'bullshit' also has an output-centered meaning and partly because the metaphor of 'indifference to truth' is becoming very stretched

@DarrinADurant @David_Gunkel Say (thought experiment) an LLM has true outputs 90% or 99% of time... Then the insistence that this LLM is a bullshit machine that only produces bullshit seems a bit off to me...

Is ChatGPT 'bullshit'? It's...complicated. It was a pleasure to work with David Gunkel on our paper, 'Cut the Crap', just out! @David_Gunkel link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@DarrinADurant @David_Gunkel How much truth an LLM produces seems an empirical question. One of our thoughts was that claiming ChatGPT is a bullshit machine producing nothing but bullshit is misleading—since some/many of its outputs are accurate, despite its obvious failures

@CoghSimon @David_Gunkel If so, if the equal capacity claim derives from BS as unconcerned either way, doesn’t that argument license LLM’s as inherently bullshitters? And any truths are accidental byproducts that indeed depend themselves on retrospective human judgements?

@DarrinADurant @David_Gunkel Cheers. The main point for me here is that while the liar is directed to untruth, and the truth-teller to truth, the (Frankfurtian) bullshitter is directed to neither - untruth/truth are 'equally' on a level, and thus they may come out with either

@CoghSimon @David_Gunkel An interesting discussion. Is it true that: “LLMs are equally capable of producing both what we call bullshit and statements that we would evaluate as true.” Equally? I may grant not all instances of anthropomorphizing machines is problematic. But, “equally …”?

@DarrinADurant Thanks Darrin :)

A thought provoking addition to how to think about LLM’s. @CoghSimon link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Will AI revolutionize education? NO. The use of AI neglects the value of ‘knowing how’ in ‘knowing that’. A call to reject dodgy lowering of educational ambitions. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

💩 Cut the Crap: A Critical Response to 'ChatGPT is Bullshit.' New #OpenAccess article co-authored with @CoghSimon and published in "Ethics and Information Technology"

What makes a good search engine? These 4 models can help you use search in the age of AI theconversation.com/what-makes-a-g… via @ConversationEDU

What is an ethically good search engine? Our new paper looks at this @damiano10 link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Our article "Control Search Rankings, Control the World: What is a Good Search Engine?" has now been published as #OpenAccess at the Springer's AI and Ethics journal: link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Compassionate conservation in practice: A values-driven, interdisciplinary, pluralistic, and deliberative community sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

AI doesn’t just impact. Humans, also non-humans including animals. theconversation.com/animals-in-the…