Professor Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University in Toronto. Previously, she was Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the NYU Center for Bioethics, and an affiliate faculty member in the Medical Ethics division of the NYU Department of Population Health.

This event is the keynote address for the Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference and is sponsored by the Dolliver NEH Project “Humanities and Artificial Intelligence,” the Catharine Gould Chism Fund for the Humanities, and the Department of Philosophy.

Talk abstract: Generative AI systems are trained on millions of human works scraped from the internet without credit or compensation. Is this theft? Many people copy-paste their unwitting friends’ text messages into chatbots to help them craft clever responses. Is this a privacy violation? I will argue that the answer to these questions is indeterminate. Our existing moral concepts, like theft and privacy, cannot be cleanly applied to novel patterns of causation made possible by new machine learning technology. This has important implications both for moral theory and for public debate. We will need to resist the temptation to argue by analogy to familiar cases. Instead we will need to engage in deeper reflection on the central values encoded in our destabilized concepts, and weigh whether and how these can be re-implemented in unfamiliar conditions. Such fundamental rethinking can be legitimate only through public debate, not by technocratic fiat.

All are welcome! Refreshments will be served.