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Feature Article
On Ethical AI Principles
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2025/05/29

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I have commented in my newsletter that what people have been describing as 'ethical AI principles' actually represents a specific political agenda, and not an ethical agenda at all. In this post, I'll outline some ethical principles and work my way through them to make my point.

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Ethical AI vs Ethical Coffee Production
Miguel Guhlin, Another Think Coming, 2025/05/29

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Miguelk Guhlin responds to my question, "Why are we so much more stringent about AI ethics than, say, the ethics of coffee production?" He writes, "The simple answer is, coffee production is regulated, the negative effects are localized and active efforts underway to mitigate impacts." Ah, I love a good pithy response! But the fact remains, though, that our morning cup of coffee consumes as much energy as AI, and nobody is taking to the barricades over that.

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10 Google I/O Drops That Matter for Edtech
Alex Sarlin, Edtech Insiders, 2025/05/29

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This article allows me to mention several recent Google announcements in a single post. One of them is Gemini's quiz feature. Another is the announcment of new AI video capabilities (though I think it still lags what's out there). Also, real time translation in Google Meet.

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The Internet of Consent
Anil Dash, 2025/05/29

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I like Anil Dash but I think he's serving up a bit of revisionist history here. There were informal standards, he writes, to the effect that websites would never track or surveil their viewers. It's not true, of course. Of sure, maybe in some circles such an agreement existed. But even the very first web servers tracked every access. My most successful project ever (reaching hundreds of thousands of hits a day) was the Referrer Project, from 2002, exploiting the use of the HTTP_REFERER environment variable to display where visitors to a website came from. From the very early days, search engines used redirection to count hits to referenced web pages. Even today, there's no real expectation that we aren't being tracked and surveilled online. None of this mattered until the web became widely used and commercialized. That's when it began to be used against us. That's when it began to be a problem.

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The Insane Influencer Logic That Tricked Millions of People
Ben Bode, Framing Logic, YouTube, 2025/05/29

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I like this video because it's a pretty good representation of how to think clearly when watching a video or reading an article (I also think it's pretty funny because the presenter is not above using some of the techniques he has just exposed). This episode takes on the claim that 'carrots are not food' by influencer (and vendor of online courses) Candi Frazier. The presentation, not surprisingly, contains a number of logical fallacies (up to and including a fake AI-generated bit of documentary). We need more of this on the internet, not just to counter the ridiculous claims that some people make, but to show how to cut through efforts to trick us with deceptive reasoning using nothing more than common sense and basic reasoning skills. 

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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