Lucy Osler

Philosophers of emotion, the call for abstracts for EPSSE 2026 is now open! Hosted at Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Southern Germany by our lovely president Imke von Maur on 24-26 June 2026 💕

#philsky

The British Society of Aesthetics seeks to appoint a paid, part-time Editor for its website, newsletter, and social media. Applicants will be expected to be UK-based postgraduates working in aesthetics.

The deadline for applications is 22 October 2025.

Some academic conferences are treasurable spaces to meet new people, get together with old friends and share research with keen students—and this was one of those. Thanks @bexmillar.bsky.social, @lucyosler.bsky.social and staff and students at @cardiffphilosophy.bsky.social! (It was not sad at all)

Loved every second! more soon pls ❤️

B&W photo of Pilar Lopez-Cantero presenting

B&W photo of Ian James Kidd

B&W photo of Tom Roberts

B&W photo of Sarah Fisher

Absolute peak academia at our sad philosophy workshop! The cosiest and kindest contemplation of exbots & heartbreak, grief & negative relations, and AI psychosis that you could wish for. Thanks @bexmillar.bsky.social, @lopezcantero.bsky.social & our lovely participants 🖤

hope we can do a part 2 👀

This is today! Please do come along if you're in Cardiff.

Announcing New Welsh Voices in English Literature - a new research series at Swansea!

I wanted to devote some of my @leverhulme.ac.uk trust fellowship to promoting work by other ECRs in Wales.

I'm really looking forward to these two talks this semester, with Bridget Bartlett and Beth Pyner.

Hallucinating with AI: AI Psychosis as Distributed Delusions There is much discussion of the false outputs that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok create. In popular terminology, these have been dubbed AI hallucinations. H...

I explore these ideas and more in my preprint, “Hallucinating with AI: AI psychosis and distributed delusions”, where I argue that we need to move beyond thinking about AI “hallucinating at us” to understanding how we “hallucinate with AI”

#philsky

arxiv.org/abs/2508.19588

Thanks to Robert Hart for taking the time to chat to me about AI psychosis!

AI Psychosis Is Rarely Psychosis at All A wave of AI users presenting in states of psychological distress gave birth to an unofficial diagnostic label. Experts say it’s neither accurate nor needed, but concede that it’s likely to stay.

Chatbots are explicitly being designed “to elicit intimacy and emotional engagement in order to increase our trust in and dependency on them” (me in Wired magazine 🤭). This designed intimacy combined with AI sycophancy creates serious risks for delusional thinking

www.wired.com/story/ai-psy...

Thanks to Cardiff for funding our Sad Philosophy Workshop next week with me, @lopezcantero.bsky.social and @bexmillar.bsky.social

We’ll be in the melancholy domains of grief and negative relationships, heartbreak and chatbots, and ai psychosis 🖤 🖤🖤

Artificial Intelligence and Human Orientation

Kicking off the third AI and Orientation seminar with the wonderful Chris Durt today 😍 really looking forward to having an international and interdisciplinary nerd out each week www.orientation-philosophy.com/seminars/art...

Thanks so much, Dan!

thank you! very weird and exciting to be (back) here

thank you ❤️

this is delightfully optimistic, it’s rained most of the day here 😆😆

AI Gossip Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products an...

Really excited to be starting this new chapter at Exeter and to continue exploring (giving myself anxiety about) the social and affective implications of AI

If you want to see the pre-print of the paper, check it out here: arxiv.org/abs/2508.08143

🎉 What a lovely way to celebrate my first day at Exeter! This fun conversation with Jim Baxter @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social about a paper my now-colleague @joelkrueger.com and I wrote on AI Gossip is now up!

In the podcast we discuss how AI systems might engage in gossip-like behaviour 🙊

44. Do Large Language Models Gossip? With Lucy Osler - Ethics Untangled Gossip is an ethically interesting phenomenon when humans do it. It creates a bond between the people doing the gossiping, but it does so by implicitly excluding the person being gossiped about, and c...

Podcast link here: www.buzzsprout.com/2113237/epis...

Religious Freedom and Meaning Vertigo: A Social Imaginaries Analysis of ‘The Persecuted Faithful’ in The Australian’s Op-Eds In Australia, divisive debate on the matter of religious freedom has come to the fore following the introduction of marriage equality in 2017 and increasing protections against trans and gender divers...

Excited to share "Religious Freedom and Meaning Vertigo: A Social Imaginaries Analysis of ‘The Persecuted Faithful’ in The Australian’s Op-Eds" forthcoming in For, Against, Together: Antagonistic Political Emotions edited by the brilliant @lucyosler.bsky.social & Thomas Szanto
tinyurl.com/374skfza

Big move on the horizon and feeling far too emotional to clean my “offloading all my tasks to try and concretise my sense of identity and achievement” whiteboard 🫣

A Case for Contingent Absurdity A popular view on existential absurdity holds that if life is absurd, it must be inescapably so. In opposition to this view, I argue that the concept of existential absurdity allows for life to be co...

✨Congratulations to our doctoral student Thom Hamer ✨

whose paper

✨ 'A Case for Contingent Absurdity' ✨

has just been published in

✨ European Journal of Philosophy ✨

Llongyfarchiadau, Thom! Gefeliciteerd!

Conspiracy Theories and Storytelling A blog about imperfect cognitions, such as delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, and implicit biases.

In June, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies hosted a workshop on conspiracy theory and story telling at the University of Birmingham, featuring five exciting academics working on the topic. Today's post presents a brief summary of each of their talks.

#philsky #philpsy

I secretly love making them 😳

(I guess not so secretly now)

new heights of virtuous procrastination today: uncalled for gantt charting

I'm not very good at this social media business, but today feels like a significant enough milestone: As of today I'll be a postdoc working between the University of Copenhagen and the Affective Societies Centre at FU Berlin for a Carlsberg-funded project on the 'Politics and Affects of Doubt'!

Still some spots available for our upcoming Fanzine Workshop at Chapter Arts Centre run by the wonderful Meena Saverimuttu ✨

Join us on Sunday to learn some history about zines and then have a go at making your own (materials and tea and coffee provided)!

PowerPoint slide for the Image Works Away Day in a wood panelled room

Delighted to have @daisydixon.bsky.social and Durre Shahwar kicking off ‘The ‘art’ of research’ Away Day here in Cardiff today, helping us explore new creative routes into our research through images and autofiction 💕