implicit bias

ChatGPT is Actively Marketing to Students During University Finals Season

Posted by Damien P. Williams on April 4, 2025

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, Actor-network theory, ai, algorithmic bias, algorithmic justice, algorithmic systems, amazon, artificial intelligence, audio, authoritarianism, bias, biomedical ethics, biotech ethics, Bruno Latour, bullshit, compassion, consciousness, damien patrick williams, data science, democracy, disability, disability studies, dising, education, embodied cognition, equity, ethics, facebook, facial recognition, fairness, feminist ethics, foucault, gender, generative pre-trained transformer, google, gpt, harry frankfurt, homophobia, implicit bias, intersubjectivity, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, justice, Karin Knorr-Cetina, knowledge, langdon winner, large language models, llm, Lorraine Daston, Machine ethics, marginalization, marginalized lived experiences, misinformation, misogyny, my face, my voice, my words, my work, my writing, neurodiversity, neuroethics, openAI, pedagogy, personhood rights, Peter Galison, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, prejudice, propaganda, race, racism, responsibility, rua williams, safiya noble, science and technology studies, science technology and society, sexism, social cognition, social construction of science, social construction of technology, social dynamics, social shaping of technology, steve woolgar, surveillance culture, systemic disparity, systems, teaching, technological ethics, technology, thomas kuhn, transcripts, transphobia, values. Leave a Comment

It’s really disheartening and honestly kind of telling that in spite of everything, ChatGPT is actively marketing itself to students in the run-up to college finals season.

We’ve talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to systems built by people who have repeatedly, doggedly proven that they will a) buy into their own hype and b) refuse to ever question their own biases and hubris. But additionally, there’s been at least two papers in the past few months alone, and more in the last two years (1, 2, 3), demonstrating that over-reliance on “AI” tools diminishes critical thinking capacity and prevents students from building the kinds of foundational skills which allow them to learn more complex concepts, adapt to novel situations, and grow into experts.

Screenshot of ChatpGPT page:ChaptGPT Promo: 2 months free for students ChatGPT Plus is now free for college students through May Offer valid for students in the US and Canada [Buttons reading "Claim offer" and "learn more" An image of a pencil scrawling a scribbly and looping line] ChatGPT Plus is here to help you through finals

Screenshot of ChatGPT[.]com/students showing an introductory offer for college students during finals; captured 04/04/2025

That lack of expertise and capacity has a direct impact on people’s ability to discern facts, produce knowledge, and even participate in civic/public life. The diminishment of critical thinking skills makes people more susceptible to propaganda and other forms of dis- and misinformation— problems which, themselves, are already being exacerbated by the proliferation of “Generative AI” text and image systems and people not fulling understanding them for the bullshit engines they are.

The abovementioned susceptibility allows authoritarian-minded individuals and groups to thus further degrade belief in shared knowledge and consensus reality and to erode trust in expertise, thus exacerbating and worsening the next turn on the cycle when it starts all over again.

All of this creates the very conditions by which authoritarians seek to cement their control: by undercutting the individual tools and social mechanisms which can empower the populace to understand and challenge the kinds of damage dictators, theocrats, fascists, and kleptocrats seek to do on the path to enriching themselves and consolidating power.

And here’s OpenAI flagrantly encouraging said over-reliance. The original post on linkedIn even has an image of someone prompting ChatGPT to guide them on “mastering [a] calc 101 syllabus in two weeks.” So that’s nice.

No wait; the other thing… Terrible. It’s terrible.

View Kate Rouch’s graphic linkKate RouchKate Rouch • 3rd+Premium • 3rd+ Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI.Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI. 21h • Edited • 21 hours ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn ChatGPT Plus is free during finals! We can’t achieve our mission without empowering young people to use AI. Fittingly, today we launched our first scaled marketing campaign. The campaign shows students different ways to take advantage of ChatGPT as they study, work out, try to land jobs, and plan their summers. It also offers ChatGPT Plus’s more advanced capabilities to students for free through their finals. You’ll see creative on billboards, digital ads, podcasts, and more throughout the coming weeks. We hope you learn something useful! If you’re a college student in the US or Canada, you can claim the offer at www.chatgpt.com/students

Screenshot of a linkedIn post from OpenAI’s chief marketing officer. Captured 04/04/2025

Understand this. Push back against it. Reject its wholesale uncritical adoption and proliferation. Demand a more critical and nuanced stance on “AI” from yourself, from your representatives at every level, and from every company seeking to shove this technology down our throats.

Audio, Slides, and Transcript for my 2024 SEAC Keynote

Posted by Damien P. Williams on December 30, 2024

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, Actor-network theory, ai, algorithmic bias, algorithmic justice, algorithmic systems, amazon, artificial intelligence, audio, authoritarianism, bias, biomedical ethics, biotech ethics, Bruno Latour, bullshit, compassion, consciousness, damien patrick williams, data science, democracy, disability, disability studies, disinformation, embodied cognition, equity, ethics, facebook, facial recognition, fairness, feminist ethics, foucault, gender, generative pre-trained transformer, google, gpt, harry frankfurt, homophobia, implicit bias, intersubjectivity, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, justice, Karin Knorr-Cetina, knowledge, langdon winner, large language models, llm, Lorraine Daston, Machine ethics, marginalization, marginalized lived experiences, misinformation, misogyny, my face, my voice, my words, my work, my writing, neurodiversity, neuroethics, openAI, personhood rights, Peter Galison, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, prejudice, propaganda, race, racism, responsibility, rua williams, safiya noble, science and technology studies, science technology and society, sexism, social cognition, social construction of science, social construction of technology, social dynamics, social shaping of technology, Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum, steve woolgar, surveillance culture, systemic disparity, systems, teaching, technological ethics, technology, thomas kuhn, transcripts, transphobia, values. 1 comment

Back in October, I was the keynote speaker for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum‘s 25th annual conference. My talk was titled “On Truth, Values, Knowledge, and Democracy in the Age of Generative ‘AI,’” and it touched on a lot of things that I’ve been talking and writing about for a while (in fact, maybe the title is familiar?), but especially in the past couple of years. Covered deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, the social construction of knowledge, artifacts, and consensus reality, and more. And I know it’s been a while since the talk, but it’s not like these things have gotten any less pertinent, these past months.

As a heads-up, I didn’t record the Q&A because I didn’t get the audience’s permission ahead of time, and considering how much of this is about consent, that’d be a little weird, yeah? Anyway, it was in the Q&A section where we got deep into the environmental concerns of water and power use, including ways to use those facts to get through to students who possibly don’t care about some of the other elements. There were a honestly a lot of really trenchant questions from this group, and I was extremely glad to meet and think with them. Really hoping to do so more in the future, too.

A Black man with natural hair shaved on the sides & long in the center, grey square-frame glasses, wearing a silver grey suit jacket, a grey dress shirt with a red and black Paisley tie, and a black N95 medical mask stands on a stage behind a lectern and in front of a large screen showing a slide containing the words On Truth, Values, Knowledge,and Democracy in the Age of Generative “AI”Dr. Damien Patrick Williams Assistant Professor of Philosophy Assistant Professor of Data Science University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and an image of the same man, unmasked, with a beard, wearing a silver-grey pinstriped waistcoat & a dark grey shirt w/ a purple paisley tie in which bookshelves filled w/ books & framed degrees are visible in the background

Me at the SEAC conference; photo taken by Jason Robert (see alt text for further detailed description).

Below, you’ll find the audio, the slides, and the lightly edited transcript (so please forgive any typos and grammatical weirdnesses). All things being equal, a goodly portion of the concepts in this should also be getting worked into a longer paper coming out in 2025.

Hope you dig it.

Until Next Time.

Audio, Transcript, and Slides from “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture”

Posted by Damien P. Williams on September 22, 2019

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, Actor-network theory, african diaspora, africanfuturism, afrofuturism, akira, algorithmic systems, amazon, animal ethics, Anne Leckie, anthropology, audio, bias, bitch planet, black panther, compassion, consciousness, damien patrick williams, decolonial studies, decolonization, disability, disability studies, Dune, ethics, ethnography, farscape, feminist ethics, frank herbert, frankenstein, gender, ghost in the shell, implicit bias, indigenous knowledge, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, iron man, Janelle Monáe, kelly sue deconnick, Lizzo, mary shelley, Missy Elliott, my voice, my words, my work, my writing, N.K. Jemisin, neurodiversity, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, person of interest, philosophy of technology, pop culture, post-colonial studies, primer, race, racism, Samuel Delaney, science and technology studies, science fiction, science fiction and fantasy, science technology and society, sexism, sff, social dynamics, Society for the Social Studies of Science, sociology, sts, surveillance culture, systemic disparity, technology, the animatrix, The Broken Earth, transcripts, upstream color, Urula K Le Guin, Who Fears Death, Xenogenesis. Leave a Comment

Audio, Transcripts, and Slides from “Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”

Posted by Damien P. Williams on August 20, 2019

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, algorithmic bias, algorithmic justice, algorithmic systems, amazon, animal ethics, audio, bias, biomedical ethics, biotech ethics, compassion, consciousness, damien patrick williams, debbie chachra, disability, disability studies, embodied cognition, ethics, facebook, facial recognition, feminist ethics, Gayatri Spivak, gender, google, homophobia, implicit bias, intersubjectivity, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, joy buolamwini, kimberlé williams crenshaw, Machine ethics, machine intelligence, misogyny, my voice, my words, my work, my writing, neurodiversity, neuroethics, personhood rights, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, race, racism, ruha benjamin, science and technology studies, science technology and society, sexism, social cognition, social dynamics, Society for Philosophy and Technology, surveillance culture, systemic disparity, technological ethics, technology, transcripts, transphobia. 2 comments

Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,’ given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019.

(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;’ talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019)

Now, I’ve got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a couple of reasons.

First, the Current Occupants of the Oval Office have very recently taken the policy position that algorithms can’t be racist, something which they’ve done in direct response to things like Google’s Hate Speech-Detecting AI being biased against black people, and Amazon claiming that its facial recognition can identify fear, without ever accounting for, i dunno, cultural and individual differences in fear expression?

[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]

All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful.

And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn’t get through in many of our discussions is that it’s not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the “right way” to build and train said systems.

That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they’re doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand.

All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutional problem.

So here are the Slides:

The Audio:

Audio Player

00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

[Direct Link to Mp3]

And the Transcript is here below the cut:

2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series Final Report

Posted by Damien P. Williams on March 8, 2019

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, Adrian Willoughby, advaita vedanta, algorithmic bias, Alva Noe, animal ethics, Antonio Chella, bias, Bill Rowe, biomedical ethics, biotech ethics, buddhism, Christof Koch, compassion, consciousness, damien patrick williams, Daniel Sanchez, daoism, David Chalmers, David Gamez, David Presti, David Sahner, disability, disability studies, Earth Erowid, eastern philosophy, embodied cognition, ethics, extended mind hypothesis, feminist ethics, Fire Erowid, Gary Small, gender, Giulio Tononi, Henk Barendregt, homophobia, Ian Horswill, implicit bias, intersubjectivity, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, Joanna Bryson, John Murray, John Rushby, John Sullins III, Jonathan Moreno, Julia Mossbridge, machine consciousness, Machine ethics, machine intelligence, machine minds, Marcia Grabowecky, Mark Bickhard, my words, my work, my writing, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, neurodiversity, neuroethics, nonhuman animals, nonhuman personhood, nonwestern philosophy, Owen Holland, Patrick Lincoln, Paul Syverson, personhood rights, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, race, racism, Robin Zebrowski, Ron Rensink, Selmer Bringsjord, sexism, shannon vallor, social cognition, social dynamics, sri international, Subash Kak, Susan Blackmore, Susan Kaiser-Greenland, Susan Schneider, taoism, technological ethics, technology, technology and consciousness workshop series, transphobia. 4 comments

“Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At Stake?”

Posted by Damien P. Williams on January 16, 2019

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, ableism, advaita vedanta, algorithmic bias, animal ethics, autonomous created intelligence, autonomous creative intelligence, autonomous generated intelligence, autonomously creative intelligence, bias, biomedical ethics, biotech ethics, buddhism, compassion, consciousness, daoism, disability, disability studies, distributed machine consciousness, eastern philosophy, embodied cognition, embodied machine consciousness, ethics, extended mind hypothesis, feminist ethics, gender, homophobia, implicit bias, intersubjectivity, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, machine consciousness, Machine ethics, machine intelligence, machine minds, my words, my work, my writing, neurodiversity, neuroethics, nonhuman animals, nonhuman personhood, nonwestern philosophy, personhood rights, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, race, racism, sexism, social cognition, social dynamics, taoism, technological ethics, technology, technology and consciousness workshop series, transphobia. 1 comment

[This paper was prepared for the 2019 Towards Conscious AI Systems Symposium co-located with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2019 Spring Symposium Series.

Much of this work derived from my final presentation at the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series: “Science, Ethics, Epistemology, and Society: Gains for All via New Kinds of Minds”.]

Abstract. This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implications of multiple different definitions and formulations of human and nonhuman consciousness. Drawing upon research from race, gender, and disability studies, including the phenomenological basis for knowledge and claims to consciousness, I discuss the history of the struggles for personhood among different groups of humans, as well as nonhuman animals, and systems. In exploring the history of personhood struggles, we have a precedent for how engagements and recognition of conscious machines are likely to progress, and, more importantly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of consciousness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status—questions which require a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationality, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests, in determining or applying labels of consciousness.

Keywords: Consciousness, Machine Consciousness, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Bodyminds

[Overlapping images of an Octopus carrying a shell, a Mantis Shrimp on the sea floor, and a Pepper Robot]

We do a lot of work and have a lot of conversations around here with people working on the social implications of technology, but some folx sometimes still don’t quite get what I mean when I say that our values get embedded in our technological systems, and that the values of most internet companies, right now, are capitalist brand engagement and marketing. To that end, I want to take a minute to talk to you about something that happened, this week and just a heads-up, this conversation is going to mention sexual assault and the sexual predatory behaviour of men toward young girls.
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The Second Future of A.I. Retreat

Posted by Damien P. Williams on September 25, 2018

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, afrofuturism, algorithmic bias, algorithmic intelligence, algorithmic justice, algorithmic systems, andy budd, animal ethics, artificial intelligence, artificial superintelligence, assistive technology, autonomous created intelligence, autonomous creative intelligence, autonomous generated intelligence, autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, autonomously creative intelligence, auto^2, bias, cennydd bowles, clearleft, communication, data, decolonization, design, disability, disability studies, distributed machine consciousness, economics, education, electronic personhood, embodied machine consciousness, ethics, ethnicity, gender, gender studies, implicit bias, intersectionality, Invisible Architecture of Bias, Invisible Architectures of Bias, juvet, kimberlé williams crenshaw, machine consciousness, Machine ethics, machine intelligence, machine learning, machine minds, man machine coevolution, moral agency, moral patiency, neurodiversity, neuroethics, nonhuman personhood, norway, personhood rights, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, science technology and society, smart cities, sociology, superintelligence, systemic disparity, technological ethics, technology, the future of a.i. retreat, The Second Future of A.I. Retreat, values. 1 comment

Kirsten and I spent the week between the 17th and the 21st of September with 18 other utterly amazing people having Chatham House Rule-governed conversations about the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

We were in Norway, in the Juvet Landscape Hotel, which is where they filmed a lot of the movie Ex Machina, and it is even more gorgeous in person. None of the rooms shown in the film share a single building space. It’s astounding as a place of both striking architectural sensibility and also natural integration as they built every structure in the winter to allow the dormancy cycles of the plants and animals to dictate when and where they could build, rather than cutting anything down.

And on our first full day here, Two Ravens flew directly over my and Kirsten’s heads.

Yes.

[Image of a rainbow rising over a bend in a river across a patchy overcast sky, with the river going between two outcropping boulders, trees in the foreground and on either bank and stretching off into the distance, and absolutely enormous mountains in the background]

I am extraordinarily grateful to Andy Budd and the other members of the Clear Left team for organizing this, and to Cennydd Bowles for opening the space for me to be able to attend, and being so forcefully enthused about the prospect of my attending that he came to me with a full set of strategies in hand to get me to this place. That kind of having someone in your corner means the world for a whole host of personal reasons, but also more general psychological and socially important ones, as well.

I am a fortunate person. I am a person who has friends and resources and a bloody-minded stubbornness that means that when I determine to do something, it will more likely than not get fucking done, for good or ill.

I am a person who has been given opportunities to be in places many people will never get to see, and have conversations with people who are often considered legends in their fields, and start projects that could very well alter the shape of the world on a massive scale.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a grandiose statement, but you’re here reading this, and so you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

I am a person who tries to pay forward what I have been given and to create as many spaces for people to have the opportunities that I have been able to have.

I am not a monetarily wealthy person, measured against my society, but my wealth and fortune are things that strike me still and make me take stock of it all and what it can mean and do, all over again, at least once a week, if not once a day, as I sit in tension with who I am, how the world perceives me, and what amazing and ridiculous things I have had, been given, and created the space to do, because and in violent spite of it all.

So when I and others come together and say we’re going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected BY the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds, then we are going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected by the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds.

So let’s talk about what that means.

Last week, I talked to The Atlantic’s Ed Yong about new research in crowd sentiment tipping points, how it could give hope and dread for those working for social change, and how it might be used by bad actors to create/enhance already-extant sentiment-manipulation factories.

From the article:

…“You see this clump of failures below 25 percent and this clump of successes above 25 percent,” Centola says. “Mathematically, we predicted that, but seeing it in a real population was phenomenal.”

“What I think is happening at the threshold is that there’s a pretty high probability that a noncommitted actor”—a person who can be swayed in any direction—“will encounter a majority of committed minority actors, and flip to join them,” says Pamela Oliver, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There is therefore a good probability that enough non-committed actors will all flip at the same time that the whole system will flip.”

We talked about a lot, and much of it didn’t make it into the article, but one of the things that matters most about all of this is that we’re going to have to be increasingly mindful and intentional about the information we take in. We now know that we have the ability to move the needle of conversation, with not too much effort, and with this knowledge we can make progressive social change. We can use this to fight against the despair that can so easily creep into this work of spreading compassion and trying to create a world where we can all flourish.

[Argentina’s Mt Tronador Casaño Overa glacier, by McKay Savage]

But we have to know that there will also be those who see this as a target number to hit so that they might better disrupt and destabilize groups and beliefs. We already know that many such people are hard at work, trying to sow doubt and mistrust. We already have evidence that these actors will make other people’s lives unpleasant for the sake of it. With this new research, they’ll be encouraged, as well. As I said to Ed Yong:

“There are already a number of people out there who are gaming group dynamics in careful ways… If they know what target numbers they have to hit, it’s easy to see how they could take this information and create [or increase the output of the existing] sentiment-manipulation factory.”

The infiltration of progressive groups to move them toward chaos and internal strife is not news, just like the infiltration (and origin) of police and military groups by white supremacists is not news.

And so, while I don’t want to add to a world in which people feel like they have to continually mistrust each other, we do have to be intentional about the work we do, and how we do it, and we have to be mindful of who is trying to get us to believe what, and why they want us to believe it. Especially if we want to get others to believe and value as we do.

This research gives us a useful set of tools and a good to place to start.

Until Next Time.

A Future Worth Thinking About

Thinking about magic, cyborgs, robots, and artificial intelligence--and why some of those words could use changing--since 1982.

All posts tagged implicit bias

The Second Future of A.I. Retreat

At HPE: “4 obstacles to ethical AI (and how to address them)”

On Social Tipping Points

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