#Ethics

“Open” AI models have a lot to give. The practice of sharing source code with the public spurs innovation and democratizes AI as a tool. Or so the story goes. A new analysis in Nature puts a twist on the narrative: Most supposedly “open” AI models, such as Meta’s Llama 3, are hardly that. Rather

AI has become uncannily good at aping human conversational capabilities. New research suggests its powers of mimicry go a lot further, making it possible to replicate specific people’s personalities. Humans are complicated. Our beliefs, character traits, and the way we approach decisions are

Have you ever wondered what chickens are talking about? Chickens are quite the communicators—their clucks, squawks, and purrs are not just random sounds but a complex language system. These sounds are their way of interacting with the world and expressing joy, fear, and social cues to one another.

Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A Goldthwaite, eds.  Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically.  New York University Press, 2024. I did a blurb for the back cover: In Ethical Eating, authors from all walks of life relate their daily struggles—moral as well as economic—to eat diets that

In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced they had successfully grown “humanized” kidneys inside pig embryos. The scientists genetically altered the embryos to remove their ability to grow a kidney, then injected them with human stem cells. The