Date: April 11, 2025 (Friday)
Speaker:
Professor Regina Rini
Associate Professor
Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition
Department of Philosophy, York University
PhD, New York University, 2011
B.A., Georgetown University, 2004
Canada Research Chair in Social and Moral Cognition and Associate Professor of Philosophy. Research background in moral psychology, ethical theory, and neuroscience
Prof. Regina Rini teaches and writes on a number of topics at the intersection of normative theory and social science. Her previously published research is mostly about the relevance of cognitive science to moral theory. Currently she is working on new projects related to the ethics of microaggression, the relationship between moral disagreement and moral agency, and the role of partisanship in political epistemology.
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.
