Lucy Osler

BBC Radio Devon - Caroline Densley, 04/03/2026 Caroline gets Devon talking and celebrates the best of what's going on in the county.

Dr @lucyosler.bsky.social from @exeterspspa.bsky.social spoke to BBC Radio Devon about why people turn to AI to find love and build relationships❤️

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

more work in progress stuff on my end. I recommend Archer & Robb’s paper on the ethics of parasocial relationships. Also not a Phil paper but I’ve been teaching Kuwort and Emory Jr.’s work on one and a half sided PSRs.

Speech and Society: Contemporary Philosophy of Language The Cardiff University Philosophy Department will hold a conference on “Speech and Society: Contemporary Philosophy of Language” taking place 24th – 25th of June. In recent years, t...

#philsky

Call for papers ::

Speech and Society: Contemporary Philosophy of Language

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Emma Borg
Professor Jennifer Mather Saul

Conference dates: 24-25 June

Abstract deadline: 2 April

Full details:

Bright red book cover with the title and author's name in black.

Dr Daisy Dixon's new book ––

DEPRAVED: The Story of Dangerous Art

–– an analysis of the varieties of immoral art and the ways that we should respond to it ––

is now available to preorder!

Waterstones are offering a 25% discount until 20 February – used code FEB26: bit.ly/Dixon-DSDA

#philsky

Now out in Philosophy & Technology!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

😮 I’m flattered!

Currently on a bus in Bristol, heading to this awesome event -- great poster, for starters!

Attendance is free and hybrid but does require registration.

Programme in the registration links ✨

In person registration (limited spaces): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Online registration: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Just one week til our “Social AI: A Philosophy Workshop”

🌟We will be joined by Pii Telakivi, Rob Clowes, Kris Goffin, Shahd Omar, Kesavan Thenagopal, Mike Barnes, Mercedes Corredor, Ben White, Leda Bario, Allister Lee, Àger Pérez Casanovas, Shane Glackin, Tom Roberts, & Joel Krueger 🌟

✨ Many congratulations to Thom Hamer, whose PhD viva was this afternoon and was passed with flying colours!

Thom’s thesis title is:
Rethinking the Absurdity of Life: A Metaexistential Inquiry

Llongyfarchiadau mawr, Dr Hamer! Gefeliciteerd! 🎓

The CFP for the one-day pre-conference workshop “The Power of (Dis-)Placing: Affect, Practice and the Political” is open until the 15th of feb. Send your abstracts (500w) to imke.von.maur[at]ku.de with the subject ‘EPSSE 2026 Pre-conference’

Coming soon: my new book *The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction*. More info - including three very generous blurbs from @davidgunkel.bsky.social, @briandavidearp.bsky.social, & Crystal L'Hote, PhD - here: hackettpublishing.com/new-forthcom...
#aiethics #philosophy

AI Chatbots Are Quietly Trading Gossip About People With Zero Fact-Checking AI chatbots already say questionable things to humans. Now, they may be swapping those same questionable takes with each other.

“feral gossip” is such an excellent coinage from @lucyosler.bsky.social and @joelkrueger.com to describe the way LLMs amplify gossip about real people as they pass slop back and forth between training sets.

www.vice.com/en/article/a...

AI gossip - Ethics and Information Technology 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...

We use @kevinroose.com’s wild experience with Sydney as our core example

Full article here link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#philsky

AI Chatbots Are Quietly Trading Gossip About People With Zero Fact-Checking AI chatbots already say questionable things to humans. Now, they may be swapping those same questionable takes with each other.

The AI gossip paper @joelkrueger.com and I wrote got picked up by Vice! We argue that chatbots generate gossip about people and consider how this gossip becomes ‘feral’ without the social constraints that usually moderate human rumor-spreading

🗣️🤖💬🫢

www.vice.com/en/article/a...

Lopes, Dominic McIver. Aesthetic Injustice. Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. 208. $100.00 (cloth). | Ethics: Vol 136, No 2

Daisy Dixon and I have a friendly-critical review of Dominic Lopes’s *Aesthetic Injustice* out in the new issue of Ethics.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

We’re at the 63rd Maudsley Debate on ‘The Chatbot will see you now: This house believes AI will do more harm than good to the nation's mental health. #MaudsleyDebate

63rd Maudsley Debate The Chatbot will see you now: This house believes AI will do more harm than good to the nation's mental health.

Loving the anachronistic mood of getting ready for a Christmas debate later today! Paired with a good old fashioned risk of a family argument, as my dad’s attending 🫣

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/63rd-mauds...

PhD: AHRC Studentship | University of Exeter Project descriptionThe University of Exeter is offering up to three fully funded AHRC doctoral studentships and training and development opportunities across a range of the AHRC’s disciplines for cand...

Three AHRC PhD Scholarships available for Humanities subjects at Exeter, including Philosophy! February deadline, see link for details:

www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Cheeky little chapter on Knowing oneself with and through AI for an edited volume forthcoming in 2026 🤗

Had fun playing around with the move from Clark and Chalmers’ Otto to Rob Clowes’ Cloud-Otto to my LLM-Otto 📓☁️🤖

Really excited to be organising this one. Such a fantastic group of speakers. I can’t wait to discuss with them about what atmospheres are, how they unfold and why they matter.

With @lucyosler.bsky.social @keithallenyork.bsky.social @reaveyp.bsky.social
@joelkrueger.com
@reaveyp.bsky.social

Can’t wait for this!

New from the band formerly known as Hearing the Voice...a short paper about felt presence and early psychosis.

We report some basic links to things like fear and quoted examples from our "Voices in Psychosis" study 1/3

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Abstract deadline tomorrow if anyone is interested in joining us in Exeter in February to talk all things Social AI!

I totally agree and I don’t want to suggest that only bad things happen in interactions with social AI, I’m interested in the wide variety of experiences people have. My broader interest, though, is how we can all construct realities with AI that are increasingly personalised and self-involving

The empirical data is still unclear and rests on anecdotal reports from users and clinicians, so a lot of this work is speculative. What might be noteworthy is how chatbots are an easily accessible like-minded person that is designed to co-create with you, which not all people will engage in

AI-induced psychosis: the danger of humans and machines hallucinating together We’ve always relied on friends and family to confirm our sense of reality. Now we’re increasingly expecting AIs to do it instead.

Our sense of reality is intimately entwined with our interactions with other people. What happens when those interactions are instead with social AI? See my piece on (so-called) ‘AI-induced psychosis’ in The Conversation

theconversation.com/ai-induced-p...

✨CFA✨

I’m hosting a workshop on Social AI at the Uni of Exeter, generously funded by the Society of Applied Philosophy (10&11 Feb). If you fancy joining us to present your work, please submit an abstract!

Confirmed speakers: Rob Clowes, Pii Telakivi, Joel Krueger, Tom Roberts, & me. #philsky

Three weeks left to submit to our conference in June 2026 -- submit your abstract via this form!

@piitelakivi.bsky.social @joelkrueger.com @tomroberts.bsky.social @spspa-uofexeter.bsky.social