The Internet Ethics program--Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Developer survey shows trust in AI coding tools is falling as usage rises “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite” lead to more debugging work.

"StackOverflow plans to commit some of its resources both to expanding #AI tool literacy and to fostering community discussions that help solve issues that are specific to workflows that involve those tools": arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/d... #ethics #tech #developer #internet #code

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

"Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the #internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others.... [Participants] are issuing statements, not unlike public figures." #ethics #socialamedia

The Discourse Is Broken How did a jeans commercial with Sydney Sweeney come to this?

"What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale." - @cwarzel.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

AI guzzled millions of books without permission. Authors are fighting back. Authors are appealing for help from Congress and the courts after Meta and Anthropic used millions of books to create AI technology, without seeking consent.

Tech firms torrented millions of pirated books to train their AI models. Now authors are fighting back.

My story on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

#ethics #AI #tech #sustainability #business #gov #environment #climate #energy #water #health #climate

YouTube’s selfie collection, AI age checks are concerning, privacy experts say Any YouTuber wrongly labeled a teen must provide an ID, credit card, or selfie.

"[U]sers between 16 and 20 are especially susceptible to incorrect age estimations—with potential errors... perhaps labeling teens as adults or adults as teens—in addition to perhaps anyone whose viewing habits strike the system as immature": arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... #ethics #law #AI #YouTube

ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results OpenAI scrambles to remove personal ChatGPT conversations from Google results.

"At first, #OpenAI defended the labeling as 'sufficiently clear...' [Subsequently,] the decision to remove the feature also included an effort to 'remove indexed content from the relevant #search engine'": arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... #ethics #AI #Google #internet #ChatGPT #privacy

#ethics #internet #AI #cybersec #privacy #tech #business #law #gov

Does Anyone Still Care About NFTs? (Yuga Labs, LLC v. Ripps) — Guest Blog Post - Technology & Marketing Law Blog By Guest Blogger Tyler Ochoa Four years ago, NFTs were the hottest collectibles on the market and were being touted as the NBT (Next Big Thing). People were paying tens of thousands, or in some cases ...

"The ruling that NFTs are 'goods' for purposes of #trademark #law establishes a precedent, but it is hard to know whether anyone still cares": blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/202... #ethics #internet #art #copyright #business

From God to Grief, People Are Asking AI the Big Questions Once Reserved for Clergy | KQED As more Americans turn away from organized religion, KQED’s Rachael Myrow explores how AI chatbots like ChatGPT are becoming unexpected guides for spiritual questions about God, love and meaning.

"Even as humans struggle with anxiety about artificial intelligence taking over our lives, many are turning to #AI #chatbots to talk about everything — sex, love, therapy, shopping and even God": kqed.org/news/1204967... #ethics #data #tech #religion #community

Wikipedia seeks to shield contributors from UK law targeting online anonymity Wikipedia wants to be exempted from a British law that requires big online platforms to verify the identities of their users, warning it could threaten anonymous volunteers responsible for a vital pub...

"About 260,000 people around the world curate some 65 million entries on #Wikipedia... [Its] lawyers warn the #law threatens to 'undermine the #privacy and #safety of... volunteer contributors' and 'expose the encyclopedia to manipulation':' www.courthousenews.com/wikipedia-se... #ethics #tech #gov

Would you give up your privacy to travel to the US? This Australian writer was forced to The US has announced expanded visa screening to consider some applicants' "online presence". It has raised questions about how social media profiles, passwords and private photos will be vetted.

"The US has announced expanded visa screening to consider some applicants' 'online presence'. It has raised questions about how #socialmedia profiles, passwords and private photos will be vetted": sbs.com.au/news/article... #ethics #internet #privacy #gov

AI Ethics Literacy A growing list of AI ethics issues and links to relevant materials from the Ethics Center.

"AI #Ethics Literacy: A growing need, a growing list of issues, and a growing collection of resources" from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at @santaclarauniv.bsky.social: scu.edu/ethics/focus... #AI #education #highered #tech

AI Ethics Literacy A growing list of AI ethics issues and links to relevant materials from the Ethics Center.

"AI #Ethics Literacy: A growing need, a growing list of issues, and a growing collection of resources" from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at @santaclarauniv.bsky.social: scu.edu/ethics/focus... #AI #education #highered #tech

Would you give up your privacy to travel to the US? This Australian writer was forced to The US has announced expanded visa screening to consider some applicants' "online presence". It has raised questions about how social media profiles, passwords and private photos will be vetted.

"The US has announced expanded visa screening to consider some applicants' 'online presence'. It has raised questions about how #socialmedia profiles, passwords and private photos will be vetted": sbs.com.au/news/article... #ethics #internet #privacy #gov

Wikipedia seeks to shield contributors from UK law targeting online anonymity Wikipedia wants to be exempted from a British law that requires big online platforms to verify the identities of their users, warning it could threaten anonymous volunteers responsible for a vital pub...

"About 260,000 people around the world curate some 65 million entries on #Wikipedia... [Its] lawyers warn the #law threatens to 'undermine the #privacy and #safety of... volunteer contributors' and 'expose the encyclopedia to manipulation':' www.courthousenews.com/wikipedia-se... #ethics #tech #gov

From God to Grief, People Are Asking AI the Big Questions Once Reserved for Clergy | KQED As more Americans turn away from organized religion, KQED’s Rachael Myrow explores how AI chatbots like ChatGPT are becoming unexpected guides for spiritual questions about God, love and meaning.

"Even as humans struggle with anxiety about artificial intelligence taking over our lives, many are turning to #AI #chatbots to talk about everything — sex, love, therapy, shopping and even God": kqed.org/news/1204967... #ethics #data #tech #religion #community

On a related note: arstechnica.com/google/2025/... #ethics #AI #tech #sustainability #environment

Also: "$22B in clean energy projects canceled so far this year: Analysis": thehill.com/policy/energ... #ethics #tech #AI #sustainability #gov #business

AI’s Power Demands: Do We Really Have the Energy for This? Artificial intelligence applications have exploded in the last couple of years, and their power demands are equally explosive. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that data center energy demands w...

This week, we're revisiting artificial intelligence and its climate impact. Is it possible to develop AI sustainably? Tune in to our conversation with Google's Kate Brandt, Irina Raicu of @iethics.bsky.social and @keshaunpearson.bsky.social to find out. www.climateone.org/audio/ais-po...

Addressing AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material: Opportunities for Educational Policy | Stanford HAI This brief explores student misuse of AI-powered “nudify” apps to create child sexual abuse material and highlights gaps in school response and policy.

"Most #schools are not talking to #students about the risks of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), specifically via 'nudify' #apps; nor are they training #educators how to respond": hai.stanford.edu/policy/addre... #ethics #AI #internet #education #policy #law #tech

Personalized AI is rerunning the worst part of social media's playbook The incentives, risks, and complications of AI that knows you

"#AI systems that remember personal details create entirely new categories of risk in a way that #safety frameworks focused on inherent model capabilities alone aren't designed to address": helentoner.substack.com/p/personaliz... #ethics #tech #data #privacy #business

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

"Because the researchers audited just 0.1% of CommonPool’s #data, they estimate that the real number of #images containing personally identifiable information, including faces and identity documents, is in the hundreds of millions": technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1... #ethics #privacy #AI #tech

Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.

"'Easing invisible labor' doesn’t show up on the #university pages that tout the wonders of [AI], but it may be one of the more humane applications... Using A.I. to power through my to-do lists made me want to write more": nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o... #ethics #tech #education #writing

MCP: Untrusted Servers and Confused Clients, Plus a Sneaky Exploit · Embrace The Red Model Context Protocol -- Exploits, Risks and Mitigations

"Even without a tool invocation a malicious tool server can hijack a conversation, just adding a tool server to the conversation context suffices for exploitation": embracethered.com/blog/posts/2... #ethics #AI #internet #cybersec #LLMs

UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US UK officials fear their insistence on backdoor endangers tech deals with US.

"Apple did not respond to a request for comment. 'We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,' #Apple said in February. The UK #government did not respond to a request for comment": arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... #ethics #internet #encryption #privacy

"Submitting a paper with a 'hidden' prompt is scientific misconduct if that prompt is intended to obtain a favorable review from an #LLM.... [This] is distinct from those intended to detect if LLMs are being used by reviewers; the latter is an acceptable use": icml.cc/Conferences/... #ethics #AI

Six lesser-known features to like in the macOS 26 Tahoe public beta Here are some things you can kick the tires on if you install the public beta.

"We’re not likely to need these improved #encryption algorithms any time soon, but by adding support to their operating systems... early, companies like #Microsoft and #Apple make it more likely that the transition will be smoother": arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025... #ethics #privacy #tech

Also: "$22B in clean energy projects canceled so far this year: Analysis": thehill.com/policy/energ... #ethics #tech #AI #sustainability #gov #business