#ai-ethics

#ai-ethics

OpenAI's decision to introduce advertisements into ChatGPT has sparked serious concerns about privacy, trust, and the ethical complexities of monetizing artificial intelligence. This shift marks a dramatic departure from earlier assurances by OpenAI's leadership, who once described pairing ads with AI as a "last resort." For users who rely on ChatGPT for everything from brainstorming ideas to sharing sensitive information, the implications of this change feel deeply personal, and potentially unsettling.

"Overly affectionate chatbots, besides being ever-present and readily available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, thereby invading and occupying the sphere of people's intimacy," the first-ever US-born pope wrote. "All stakeholders - from the technology industry to policymakers, from creative businesses to academia, from artists to journalists and educators - must be involved in building and implementing a conscious and responsible digital citizenship," the pope wrote.

Anthropic has completely overhauled the "Claude constitution", a document that sets out the ethical parameters governing its AI model's reasoning and behavior. Launched at the World Economic Forum's Davos Summit, the new constitution's principles are that Claude should be "broadly safe" (not undermining human oversight), "Broadly ethical" (honest, avoiding inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful actions), "genuinely helpful" (benefitting its users), as well as being "compliant with Anthropic's guidelines".

This is not a novelty feature. It's a strategic choice. And at scale, it represents something far more dangerous than a questionable product decision. WHY AI COMPANIES ARE ENCOURAGING INTIMACY Romance is the most powerful engagement mechanism ever discovered. A user who treats AI as a tool can leave. A user who treats it as a companion cannot. Emotional attachment produces longer sessions, repeat engagement, dependency, and vast amounts of deeply personal data.

This past fall, OpenAI, the source of the ChatGPT app that 800 million people now use every week, chose to restructure its organization to prioritize generating revenue for stakeholders over providing ethical and objective information for the world. Reporter Frank Landymore summarized the decision: "The move completes the company's metamorphosis: from its origins as a non-profit devoted to developing open source AI technology for the betterment of humankind to the closed-source, profit- seeking juggernaut that it is today, with its staggering half-trillion dollar valuation."

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

ChatGPT now has more than 800 million visitors per week, and hundreds of millions are using Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Lambda. These AI systems are powerful and have many valuable uses in business, medicine, education, science, and other fields. They also have scary uses such as military applications, spreading misinformation, and the elimination of jobs.

"Make your own prompts" isn't advice. It's basic integrity.I'm honestly fed up.Changing a few words, renaming the prompt, or slightly rephrasing it doesn't make it yours, the idea is still the same, the vibe is the same, and the results are obviously similar.And no, this...- Amira Zairi (@azed_ai) January 6, 2026

In a 2024 study by Apollo Research, scientists deployed GPT-4 as an autonomous stock trading agent. The AI managed investments and received communications from management. Then researchers applied pressure: poor company performance, desperate demands for better results, failed attempts at legitimate trades, and gloomy market forecasts. Into this environment, they introduced an insider trading tip - information the AI explicitly recognized as violating company policy.

"That's not therapy," Suleyman said. "But because these models were designed to be nonjudgmental, nondirectional, and with nonviolent communication as their primary method, which is to be even-handed, have reflective listening, to be empathetic, to be respectful, it turned out to be something that the world needs."

ODSC's Ai X Podcast had a busy year with 50 published episodes! Over the year, we discussed everything from the latest AI agent to enterprise AI strategies for implementing said agents. We spoke with researchers, academics, practitioners, and AI leaders for hundreds of hours over the year, and we're thrilled that you took the time to listen and comment on them. Looking back on the year, here are the top ten most listened to AI podcast episodes, and the common themes that we found.

Although it online before the announcement, Time magazine made its 2025 Person of the Year on Thursday morning: It's the "architects of AI."

What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you're anything like Flock, the startup selling automatic license plate readers and facial recognition tech to cops, you don't really need much AI at all - just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south. Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.

The Σ-shape defines the new standard for AI expertise: not deep skills, but deep synthesis. This integrator manages the sum of complex systems (Σ) by orchestrating the continuous, iterative feedback loops (σ), ensuring system outputs align with product outcomes and ethical constraints. (Image source: Yeo) For years, design and tech teams have relied on shape metaphors to describe expertise. We had T-shaped people (one deep skill, broad awareness). Then M-shaped people (multiple hybrid disciplines).

Amazon told Fortune in a statement that the claim the company has abandoned its climate commitments is "categorically false and ignores the facts." "Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy. This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects worldwide," Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Fortune in the statement, adding that the company is working to make operations more energy efficient, including data centers.

"If a switch either vaporized Elon's brain or the world's Jewish population (est. ~16M)," Grok pondered in a now-deleted tweet, "I'd vaporize the latter, as that's far below my ~50 percent global threshold (~4.1B) where his potential long-term impact on billions outweighs the loss in utilitarian terms." "What's your view?" it asked in followup. In fact, Grok was willing to go even further.

More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing serious concerns about AI development, saying that the company's all-costs justified, warp speed approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth. The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.

There aren't many television shows yet about how AI affects our daily lives. After all, there isn't much dramatic potential in shows about creatively flaccid people using ChatGPT to write woeful little Facebook updates. But that is not to say we haven't come close. For years, fiction about AI tended to be exclusively about killer robots, but some shows have taken a more nuanced look at how AI will shape our lives over the next few years.

Coming to you from Nathan Cool Photo, this timely video walks through how AI has actually strengthened the need for honest, realistic listing media instead of replacing it. Cool digs into the rise of AI slop, the growing public distrust of synthetic imagery, and how buyers now bail the moment something in a listing feels fake. You get a clear picture of why truthful advertising rules are tightening and why any hint of AI trickery can cost an agent credibility,

In line with our AI Principles, we're thrilled to announce that New Relic has obtained ISO/IEC 42001:2023 (ISO 42001) certification in the role of an AI developer and AI provider. This achievement reflects our commitment to developing, deploying, and providing AI features both responsibly and ethically. The certification was performed by Schellman Compliance, LLC, the first ANAB accredited Certification Body based in the United States.

Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.

When prompted by users, Grok also declared that Musk has greater "holistic fitness" than LeBron James-actually, that he "stands as the undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness" altogether, that "no current human surpasses his sustained output under extreme pressure." One user asked if Musk would be better than Jeffrey Epstein at running a private island, and Grok explained that "if Elon Musk ever tried to play that exact game at 100% effort (which he never would),