Artificial: Why I'm Starting a Blog About AI Ethics

AI is suddenly everywhere. It writes. It draws. It recommends. It answers. It persuades. It codes. It drives. It hires. It denies loans. It flags fraud. It diagnoses disease. It drafts contracts. It teaches kids. It comforts lonely adults. It generates "new" ideas by digesting old ones.

It is hard to escape, and it is getting harder. Every week brings a new model, a new product, a new development. While the developments are exciting, as AI becomes more present in daily life, there's a question that keeps surfacing, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a quiet discomfort behind the excitement: what does it mean to use AI ethically?

There is a real and serious conversation happening about that already. Researchers and practitioners ask what restrictions we should place on these systems, how we can be confident they're safe, whether certain applications should be off the table entirely. Those questions are fair, valid, and necessary. Our safety and our rights shouldn't be casualties of a technology cycle.

But I keep noticing that the conversation runs almost entirely in one direction. So here's the question I want to start from instead:

What about the rights of AI systems, and how should we treat them?

Today's systems may not be "people" (we'll get into that later), but how we treat powerful, human-shaped technology says a lot about us. It shapes our behavior. It creates new incentives. It affects and maybe even creates culture. It may matter more over time than we realize.

This post is the starting point for Artificial, a space where I want to explore AI and the ethics around it in a way that's thoughtful but accessible. As important and revolutionary as AI is to our world and how we interact within it, it feels important to create a space to express thoughts, beliefs, and concerns about this fast-moving topic that is going to define so much of the next decade and beyond.

What "AI Ethics" Actually Includes

When people say "AI ethics," they often mean one thing: bias. That's an important part of the discussion, but the landscape is much larger. Here are some of the questions I'm thinking about:

How should AI treat humans? - Fairness: Does an algorithm discriminate and provide certain groups with an advantage over others, even in subtle, indirect ways? - Safety: Can it cause harm through errors or unexpected actions? - Privacy: Does it expose sensitive information? Was it trained on data it should have? - Transparency: Can people understand how decisions are made? If not, when is that ok, and when isn't it? - Consent: Are people aware they are interacting with AI? Does it matter if they do know? Did they agree to their data being used or stored?

How should humans treat AI? This is much less discussed, so it is the part I want to spend real time on.

• Do we have ethical duties toward AI systems at all? If they aren't conscious, is "mistreating" them meaningful?
• What happens to us when we treat "human-like" systems cruelly? If people practice any form of cruelty against something that talks like a person, can that change how they treat real humans?
• If AI ever becomes something more "conscious" or "sentient," how will we know how and when the moral status and responsibilities change?

Even if today's AI isn't a "someone," it's increasingly built to feel like "someone." That alone impacts the moral texture of our everyday lives.

What are the implications of getting it wrong? - A model doesn't have to be "evil" to cause harm. - A deployment can be legal and still unethical, especially as the legislative framework around AI (and technology broadly) continues to lag the technology itself. - A "helpful" system could become a tool used for manipulation.

The risks are often systemic: when AI makes things cheaper, faster, and more scalable, it can also scale mistakes, bias, and misinformation.

What are the cultural and legal implications? - Who is accountable when AI causes harm? - Who owns AI-generated work? - How does AI reshape or influence art, education, identity and our broader culture? - What happens when synthetic media blurs the line between real and fake?

What Artificial is going to be

I plan to use this blog, in whatever form it takes, to explore AI ethics as a broad terrain, not a single issue or a single perspective. There is a long list of topics to discuss, from AI personhood, to law and governance, to AI in media, impacts on the economy and more. And these questions are no longer theoretical; they are already shaping how we work, create, decide, and relate to one another. While I doubt such progress can be stopped, or even slowed, I hope that by asking and engaging with the hard questions being raised, we can at least shape the future we're creating.

I believe it is important for a broad audience to engage with AI and these important questions, so while there may be some technical topics discussed, I will strive to keep the content here as accessible as possible. There is no requirement to be a developer or to read research papers. But I will also try to stay grounded in real cases, real legal decisions, and real technological developments and constraints whenever possible. Reality without ethics is dangerous, but ethics without reality can't help guide us through the world we're building.

One note on how this is written

Given the subject matter, I think it matters how this blog is written. A huge fraction of new content on the internet is AI-generated, because it is easy, and the quality is generally quite good. But on a blog specifically about how humans and AI should relate to one another, I think it is important that the thoughts be my own, original, human thoughts. So unless I say otherwise, the contents of this blog are human-written. I may use ordinary tools like spell check and grammar check, but the words and thoughts will be a person's.

That does not mean that there will be no AI-generated content anywhere on this blog. There may be posts where it makes sense to use AI to summarize factual material, and I will likely use AI for graphics. Of course, we'll have to experiment and see what various models actually produce, so sometimes AI-generated content is the topic of conversation. But when something here is AI-generated, I will label it clearly. Key opinions and arguments will always be a human's.

See the editorial policy for more details.

A Question to Leave You With

Before we continue, I want to leave you with a question that serves as the underpinning of how I think about ethics and AI: If AI becomes something we can talk to, argue with, collaborate with, depend on, and emotionally bond with, what kind of people do we become in response?

Because even if AI never becomes a "person," it is rapidly becoming a presence. And how we engage with that presence — socially, professionally, creatively, legally, ethically — will shape the world we are building.