Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.
We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.
Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.
I think I could check through the names of the 20 or so most prolific Ethics Alarms commenters and guess with nearly 100% accuracy how each of them will respond to this ethics quiz.
Eight Republican Senate Republicans released a letter after President’s Trump was declared guilty as charged in his mysterious “he did something illegal in there somewhere and besides, he’s a bad guy and everyone should hate him” trial in Manhattan. It declares that they will not do anything to support President Biden for the rest of his term in office: not vote on any legislation for non-security funding, not vote on judicial and political nominations, not not vote in favor of “expedited consideration and passage” of any Democrat-proposed legislation.
Signed by conservative GOP Senators Mike Lee, J.D. Vance (Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Roger Marshall (Kan.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), the terse missive states,
The DEI hucksters and hypocrites are in the process of giving diversity a bad name (also equity and inclusion, but those are for another day.) Like so many other features of life and human existence, diversity can be a very good thing, and it can be a detriment to legitimate goals and objectives in different contexts, or even at the same time.
Stipulated: what is unethical about the current DEI fad/obsession/scam/hustle/mania is that its goal isn’t to achieve diversity in settings where it may be beneficial to society, but rather to use the deceitful rhetoric of diversity to excuse engaging in otherwise illegal discrimination and prejudice for the benefit of particular minority groups, usually the groups that the DEI warriors belong to themselves.
I had an eye-opening experience recently. I was teaching the ethics component of a three day training program for program for paralegals and legal professionals who work in large firms. When I got in front of the class, I was immediately struck by the demographics of group, which was about 80 in number. More than 90% of the attendees were black women between the ages of 25 and 45, with just a few men and about the same number of white women, less than five. I haven’t tried to analyze why the paralegal field has shaken out that way in this legal community, but here was what struck me: the group’s dynamic was completely different from and better than the usual professional groups I speak to, which are typically more male than female and overwhelmingly white.
Which crucial American institution, our journalism or our education system, has deteriorated more?
This has become an ongoing inquiry at Ethics Alarms. My official participation in either has been sporadic and marginal—no, I don’t consider writing Ethics Alarms journalism—so I cherish commentary by genuine participants. Fortunately we have a lot of teachers, former and current, who weigh in here regularly. For a long time, one regular reader used EA as an assigned class resource. (If there are any journalists out there who visit this site, they haven’t revealed themselves).
As this Comment of the Day by jdkazoo123 demonstrates, insiders in a profession can identify problems with ethical implications that the rest of us on the outside looking in may never consider. Here it is, a reaction to the post, “Ethics Dunce: University of California at Santa Cruz.” ( I also recommend Ethics Alarms special correspondent Curmie’s response to the COTD at that link.)
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I agree it’s crazy, but there’s a deeper wrong embedded in the stupid wrong–the salary of adjuncts.
Adjuncts are now essential to the functioning of almost all large higher educational institutions, and most small and medium ones as well. The market is saturated with people with PhDs, and they won’t give up the dream of teaching college easily or quickly. This creates a surplus labor force that ostensibly leftwing admins exploit like robber barons. At the same time, a largely leftwing professoriate goes along with it, wringing their hands, gee what could we do?
Robert DeNiro’s political rants about Donald Trump are crude, ad hominem attacks and a poor reflection on his character and intelligence, as I have noted more than once, most recently here. It doesn’t matter, however, how much of a jerk DeNiro is and how deluded he may be about the worth of his partisan opinions, at least as far as the legitimate plaudits he has earned for his acting (I don’t especially enjoy him as an actor, but I appreciate his talent and craft from a technical perspective) or other aspects of his life.
Interestingly, the major American historical landmarks mentioned on This Day in History are mostly cultural touch points (though Benecict Arnold was court-martialed on this date in 1779.) Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926—is she a fading icon, or is she permanently in that rare category, like Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Elvis, and Charlie Chaplin? CNN began: I actually remember what a big deal was made in 1980 about Ted Turner breaking through the network news monopoly with the world’s first 24-hour television news network. Talk about unintended consequences and shattered promise! Not only has CNN fallen into ruin, it also heralded the slow rot of broadcast news into voracious entertainment seeking ratings and audience approval rather than, you know, facts and that ethical journalism thingy. Then there was the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the first Beatles album I ever owned and one that was and still ranks as the biggest rock or pop phenomenon ever. I was moved to buy it in part because I was fascinated by the history and pop culture trivia test on the famous cover. Boy, if that stuff was trivia in 1967, it’s super-trivia now. It took a lot to get my attention in Boston in the summer of 1967, My Favorite Year, because the Red Sox were in a pennant race for the first time in my life. I still remember hearing “A Day in the Life” playing for the first time on my parents’ old Magnavox stereo with volume turned up. That amazing song sounds just as fresh and surprising every time I hear it, most recently three days ago on the Siruis/XM Beatles Channel.
1. Trump guilty verdict update: It’s still too early to determine what the full effect of Alvin Bragg’s momentarily successful “Get Trump!” plot will be on the election: all we have now, mostly, is theories and opinions. We do know that it will certainly intensify the support of those who were already all-in for the Once and Future (maybe) President; we know that the verdict triggered a fund-raising bonanza for him; the rest is unclear. Esteemed EA commenter Michael West wrote yesterday, “This election is not about Biden and Trump anymore – it’s about the fundamental social fabric of the nation as espoused by the “civic religion” centered on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – a civic religion that has served us well. How you vote tells us, now, less about what policies you wish to advance and more about whether or not you want the American experiment in ordered liberty to continue. A vote for Biden or any democrat tells me absolutely everything about you that you *do not care at all* about the republic which has blessed us directly and BILLIONS more indirectly with increased freedom, tolerance, security and commerce. A vote for Trump is the *ethical duty* of anyone who wants to poke the eye of totalitarian Behemoth that is the DNC as a demonstration of belief in our system and its reparability.”
Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 1, 2024
On the Josephson Institute’s Pillars of Character, one of the values comprising the fourth pillar, Fairness, is proportionality. Proportionality is essential to perspective, and understanding te need to maintain a broad perspective is essential to fairness, a core ethical value.
When I first started watching that video meme above, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, please. This is ridiculous. Then I saw the pay-off, and laughed out loud. I would have laughed just as hardily if the two men had been reversed.
Being unable to appreciate good-natured, puckish satire when it is aimed at your favorite politician, party, elected official, organization is a sign of a closed mind and an absence of proportionality and perspective. That video makes both candidates look silly, and that’s just fine.
If you can’t see the humor, I feel sorry for you. And I fear you. You have lost all perspective, and that leads to fanaticism.
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
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