Filippos Stamatiou

Joshua Hatherley, Sandrine R. Schiller, Iwan Williams et al.

Postmortem avatars (PMAs) -- AI systems that simulate a deceased person by being fine-tuned on data they generated or that was generated about them -- have attracted growing scholarly attention, yet their potential role in clinical settings remains largely unexplored. This paper examines the ethics of deploying PMAs as therapeutic tools in grief therapy. Drawing on the dual-process model of grief, the theory of continuing bonds, and the philosophical framework of fictionalism, we propose two potential therapeutic applications: incorporating PMAs into established imaginal exercises such as the empty chair exercise, and treating the process of PMA creation as an art-therapeutic exercise in its own right. We consider five ethical objections to these applications and argue that none constitute knock-down arguments against therapeutic use, particularly given the risk-mitigating role of the clinical context. We conclude by identifying outstanding governance challenges and calling for empirical research, without which neither the promise nor the dangers of therapeutic PMAs can be adequately assessed.

Iwan Williams, Ninell Oldenburg, Ruchira Dhar et al.

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to explain how neural networks work by uncovering their underlying causal mechanisms. As the field grows in influence, it is increasingly important to examine not just models themselves, but the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies implicit in MI research. We argue that mechanistic interpretability needs philosophy: not as an afterthought, but as an ongoing partner in clarifying its concepts, refining its methods, and assessing the epistemic and ethical stakes of interpreting AI systems. Taking three open problems from the MI literature as examples, this position paper illustrates the value philosophy can add to MI research, and outlines a path toward deeper interdisciplinary dialogue.

Sandrine R. Schiller, Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Filippos Stamatiou

Generative AI is changing our way of interacting with technology, others, and ourselves. Systems such as Microsoft copilot, Gemini and the expected Apple intelligence still awaits our prompt for action. Yet, it is likely that AI assistant systems will only become better at predicting our behaviour and acting on our behalf. Imagine new generations of generative and predictive AI deciding what you might like best at a new restaurant, picking an outfit that increases your chances on your date with a partner also chosen by the same or a similar system. Far from a science fiction scenario, the goal of several research programs is to build systems capable of assisting us in exactly this manner. The prospect urges us to rethink human-technology relations, but it also invites us to question how such systems might change the way we relate to ourselves. Building on our conception of the relational self, we question the possible effects of generative AI with respect to what we call the sphere of externalised output, the contextual sphere and the sphere of self-relating. In this paper, we attempt to deepen the existential considerations accompanying the AI revolution by outlining how generative AI enables the fulfilment of tasks and also increasingly anticipates, i.e. intercepts, our initiatives in these different spheres.

Antonia Karamolegkou, Sandrine Schiller Hansen, Ariadni Christopoulou et al.

What ethical concerns, if any, do LLM researchers have? We introduce EthiCon, a corpus of 1,580 ethical concern statements extracted from scientific papers published in the ACL Anthology. We extract ethical concern keywords from the statements and show promising results in automating the concern identification process. Through a survey, we compare the ethical concerns of the corpus to the concerns listed by the general public and professionals in the field. Finally, we compare our retrieved ethical concerns with existing taxonomies pointing to gaps and future research directions.