InnoEthics Week 1
What’s been happening recently in the world of ethical AI and technology ethics?
In celebration of launching InnoEthics, here is the first of a series of newsletter posts highlighting recent news, developments, and initiatives in the ethical AI and technology ethics sphere.
These week we cover reflective AI and how it could pave the way forward for truly ethical AI, the increased regulation of AI chatbots, and what economists mean by the ‘AI bubble’.
Reflective AI: the missing puzzle piece to teaching ethics to Artificial Intelligence?
Something I commonly get asked about is the possibility of ‘coding ethics’ into AI, especially as we increasingly delegate tasks to machines. A recent discussion with a computer science student introduced me to a new concept and approach to teaching ethics to machines: reflective AI.
This is a topic I plan on discussing in more depth in a future post, with the subject being a fascinating intersection of AI and data, psychology, and ethics. One of the things that separates a human’s brain processes to current artificial intelligence is the feature of reflection when dealing with ambiguity, logical thinking, emergent knowledge, and the social contexts present within our world.
This ability of reflection is a core feature of human thinking, especially when it comes to morals and ethics - if we can draw on this and apply it to an architecture for reflective AI agents, could we be one step closer to achieving AI that understands the ethical impact of its actions?
Increased regulation of AI chatbots: Character.ai to ban teens from talking to its AI chatbots
Some of the busiest and most important discourse surrounding AI regulation has been about how to protect teenagers and young people from the potential harmful consequences of unregulated AI and technology. This includes mitigating the possibility of young people being the victims of inappropriate or harmful interactions with AI chat bots, a topic that has significantly featured in headlines recently.
Character.ai is taking the step to reduce what kind of access under-18s will be able to have with their characters, such as only being able to generate content such as videos, and restricting the ability for users to talk to their characters. Online safety campaigners “have welcome the move but said the feature should never have been available to children in the first place.”
The company plans on enforcing this change using “new age verification methods”, and continuing research with a newly funded AI safety research lab. Cases like this demonstrate the requirement for appropriate, effective, and ethical AI regulation, focusing on safety and making sure these technologies can still be available for public use without posing a risk to those more vulnerable in society.
To read the full article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq837y3v9y1o
* * *
For those interested in the regulation of AI chatbots, I will also highlight the FlippGen blog post written as part of the ForUs campaign, discussing the Online Safety Act and the ways we should be regulating AI chatbots in order to protect young people: FlippGen Blog
Someone asked me if the AI ‘bubble’ was comparable to Tulip Mania…
As Nvidia becomes the first ever company worth $5 trillion, it is undeniable that this latest milestone reflects the growing influence of AI on markets and the economy. However, the question now is how sustainable this level of growth could be - could Nvidia continue to be worth more than the GDP of every country on earth, except for the United States and China?
Inevitably, this rapid rise of AI’s influence on the economy has had CEOs, think tanks, and news outlets comparing the current situation to the dot.com era of the 2000s, and fear of a repeat of the burst of the dot.com bubble. As companies are racking up more debt to stay at AI’s forefront, the big companies at its centre may be able to weather another burst bubble, however smaller firms, shareholders, and jobs may be still seriously affected.
Read here for the World Economic Forum’s explanation of the AI bubble: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/10/artificial-intelligence-bubble-dot-com-tulip-mania/
Click here to find out in more depth about each of these topics and participate further discussion about these topics. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.