Ariela Tubert

The 2026 Central Division meeting will take place February 18–21 in Chicago, Illinois. Visit the meeting page to register, download the program, make hotel reservations, and more! www.apaonline.org/event/2026ce...

thank you Doug!

We delivered the Regester lecture at Puget Sound last week and The News Tribune discussed it and our work on AI romantic companions and philosophical accounts of consciousness (w/ @jttiehen.bsky.social )

looking forward to giving a talk “Griefbots: Memory, Imagination, and Artificial Intelligence” tomorrow during Homecoming and Family Weekend

flyer for a talk by Dr. Kelly W called "Giving and Withholding Uptake"

Very excited to be presenting new work at the University of Puget Sound at the end of the month!

in this case, we weren’t looking for an AI overview, just doing a google search but it comes up first

AI overview on two phones

here is why you should not trust AI overviews… two of us googling the same thing but using a different terms (“rowing” vs “crew”) provided opposing answers with the same amount of confidence… (it’s funny that both searches had the same typo too but that is just human error)

I recommend it!

In our talk (w/ @jttiehen.bsky.social) we discuss the global workspace theory and the mind as a group but unified agent to argue that intelligence and consciousness need not go together as it does in human and animal minds www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk/event/artifi...

looking forward to the AI and Collective Agency conference hosted by Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk/event/artifi...

In the talk, w/ @jttiehen.bsky.social, we argue that b/c AI romantic companions are tools, created w/ a purpose, they can’t enter into authentic loving relationships. We draw on Beauvoir’s & Sartre’s framework for authentic love which sees the other as free to determine their purpose. iacapconf.org

On my way to the University of Twente to present “Love and Tools” at the workshop on Generative Companionship in the Digital Age during the joint IACAP/AISB conference on Philosophy of Computing. Looking forward to the whole event, which includes a great lineup of talks! 1/2

iacapconf.org

Love in the Time of AI: The Cost of Agreement More Human · Episode

In this episode of the More Human podcast, @jttiehen.bsky.social and I discuss our paper “Authentic Artificial Love” with host Mary Nelson. It was a fun and interesting conversation and a somewhat personal one too. open.spotify.com/episode/2nnt...

A Military Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest Over the course of several months, Pauline Shanks Kaurin concluded she no longer had the academic freedom necessary for doing her job.

Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor, uprooted her family, and moved to teach military ethics at the Naval War College. Now she's leaving in protest of policies she can't support and that make her job impossible.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

the deadline for submitting a paper to the Central APA in Chicago is coming up, submit by Monday June 2 at 5pm Central!

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American Philosophical Association The panelists for this event are as follows:

If you are an American Philosophical Association member, come chat about "bad" emotions this Thursday at 10am Pacific! @kkthomason.bsky.social and Samir Chopra are the other panelists, and @jdelston.bsky.social will moderate.
#philsky
#philosophy

Ariela Tubert & Justin Tiehen, Authentic Artificial Love - PhilPapers Often in romantic relationships, people want partners whose moral, political, and religious values align with their own. This article connects this point to the project of value alignment in AI resear...

In this new paper about AI romantic chatbots, @jttiehen.bsky.social & I argue that authentic love requires a capacity for value misalignment. Chatbot whose values are locked-in to match those its human user only allow for inauthentic love that treat the AI partner as a tool philpapers.org/rec/TUBAAL

"Do you think it's possible to prove other conscious minds exist beyond your own?" "Of course not! That's why I'm so happy. That fact that I'm the only mind in the universe means that all other apparent minds are just me. That proves I'm a genius!"

The hover text from Friday's SMBC comic (link in comments) says it was based on a chapter from my book The Weirdness of the World.

I am enjoying the Pacific APA and excited to see a great program come together after working on it for about a year in my role as chair of the program committee. now the problem is too many good sessions that I have to miss because I can only be in one place at a time!

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

The APA is currently accepting submissions for the 2025 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. The deadline for submissions is April 25.

Come chat about negative emotions with me, @kkthomason.bsky.social, and Samir Chopra. Thanks, @jdelston.bsky.social, for organizing!

same here Paul and I am looking forward to engaging with your carbon book at some point in the near future

it was a pleasure to be part of this bioethics symposium. the play was so rich in philosophical ideas arising from neurotechnology/DBS, I’ll be thinking about it for the long time. thanks to @stoertebekker.bsky.social, @paulkelleher.net, @mhbuwmad.bsky.social intranet.med.wisc.edu/bioethics-sy...

article on the dangers of generative AI for therapy. part of the issue is that the systems are designed to sound like a person so a disclaimer is not enough for people not to take them seriously… also people ask all sort of AI systems for advice, not just those marketed for therapy

2025 Central Division Meeting - Virtual (Entirely Online) To present or actively participate in sessions, you will need a computer, smartphone, or tablet with a camera, microphone, and internet access (ideally, high-speed internet access). To view session recordings, you only need a computer, smartphone, or tablet that can play videos.

I’m going to be spend a lot of time over the next two weeks at the APA’s first ever fully online conference, the brainchild of @helendecruz.net! It’s not too late to register, and there are going to be some great sessions.
Here are some of my personal highlights
www.apaonline.org/mpage/2025ce...

As you grade final papers, please keep an eye for ones that could be submitted to our student-organized undergraduate philosophy conference, to be held March 28-29, 2025. More generally, spread the word with your undergrads! Keynote speaker: @reginarini.bsky.social Submission deadline: 01/12/2025.

Transcript of Hard Fork ep 111: Yeah. And I could talk for an hour about transformers and why they are so important. But I think it's important to say that they were inspired by the alien language in the film Arrival, which had just recently come out. And a group of researchers at Google, one researcher in particular, who was part of that original team, was inspired by watching Arrival and seeing that the aliens in the movie had this language which represented entire sentences with a single symbol. And they thought, hey, what if we did that inside of a neural network? So rather than processing all of the inputs that you would give to one of these systems one word at a time, you could have this thing called an attention mechanism, which paid attention to all of it simultaneously. That would allow you to process much more information much faster. And that insight sparked the creation of the transformer, which led to all the stuff we see in Al today.

Did you know that attention across the whole input span was inspired by the time-negating alien language in Arrival? Crazy anecdote from the latest Hard Fork podcast (by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social). HT nwbrownboi on Threads for the lead.