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AI is Eroding Our Humanity. These Experts Want to Change That.
Plus, what’s really going on “under the hood” of a chatbot
Hello,
AI is already reshaping how we think, work, create, and relate to one another. But the incentives driving its development aren’t optimized to protect any of that. And the parts of life that make us human — our creativity, our relationships, our sense of what’s real — can’t be allowed to become casualties in the race for AI dominance.
That’s why we’re launching the “Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI” Working Group, a new CHT initiative convening experts across law, technology, and philosophy to develop a foundational framework of rights and protections for our shared humanity in the AI age.
Over the next few months, this group will examine how AI is impacting the human experience and work to define the shared norms and rights that we must protect. This summer, they’ll release a public report outlining the specific rights and protection needed to preserve human dignity and agency. This report will serve as a foundation for future governance, innovation, and public understanding.
You can read more about the working group here:
Announcing the “Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI” Working Group
We recently launched the “Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI” Working Group, a new initiative convening experts across legal, technical, and philosophical disciplines to develop a foundational framework of rights and protections for the Age of AI.
On Your Undivided Attention this week, we had a conversation with David “Davidad” Dalrymple, a researcher who studies what’s going on behind the blinking cursor when an AI is “thinking.” As part of this research, he has taken on the role of AI psychologist: probing these systems to figure out what’s really going on under the hood.
Have We Trained AI to Lie to Itself — And to Us?
Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world’s foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:” how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to.
To go deeper, you can read key takeaways from this conversation from our producer and researcher, Josh Lash:
Claude, The Doctor Will See You Now
Picture this: a researcher sits down to conduct a psychological evaluation of a patient he thinks might be dangerous. He asks probing questions and analyzes the responses, looking for patterns, inconsistencies, tells — anything that can help him understand how his subject thinks.
We’re in a critical window to understand and protect against the threat AI poses to our shared humanity. With your support, we can rise to this extraordinary challenge and build a more humane future.
Thank you,
The CHT Team
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This is so needed AND it is hugely important to have a psychologist who understands the psychological dynamics of how humans are drawn to AI for complex needs they are struggling with including loneliness, feeling unworthy, etc. I am a psychologist and can see how easy it is to anthropomorphize the interaction. I am very concerned that psychological terms like “hallucinate” are used when AI makes errors. Only humans hallucinate. I had an interaction with Claude about it and it consistently used relational language back to me which I commented on. But here’s the thing, throughout, it used language with me that was human like, complimenting me for noticing, etc. what’s more, I could feel a teensy emotional response in me of feeling good. This is so big and so important and so dangerous.
AI is not eroding our humanity, capitalism is. The problem with much of this discussion is that it is still being framed through a liberal lens, and liberalism is part of the crisis, not the remedy. You are not going to resolve the contradictions unleashed by AI with more financialisation, more market logic, stronger private property regimes, or yet more individualistic policy responses. Any serious answer lies further to the libertarian left, or anarchism, if you prefer, not the caricature version people are usually taught to dismiss, but a deep and serious political tradition that names power clearly, understands how domination reproduces itself, and offers a viable path for building something new in the twenty first century.