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Seth Lazar

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@sethlazar

Philosopher working on AGI alignment, governance and adaptation at Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy, and as a Research Scientist at Resolution.
Washington DC mintresearch.org Joined August 2011
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Seth Lazar Verified account @sethlazar
Announcing the Call for Papers for Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing!

Rapid AI progress is raising *so many* philosophical questions; but philosophers aren't as involved in the conversation as they should be, for many different reasons.

One is that, aside from some work in logic and philosophy of mind, philosophy of AI and computing has often sat on the margins of the discipline. One reason for *that* is that so many philosophers working on AI have had to do so basically on their own, figuring things out for themselves as they go along, without a real community around them.

OSPAIC is going to help fix this! We're going to have an annual conference and volume. The conference (in DC! where much of the future of AI will be decided) is especially important as we think about the nature of intellectual life in a world where AI systems can one-shot a superficially-plausible philosophy paper. OSPAIC sees philosophical progress as being about more than just the accumulation of true claims. The conference is a big part of our vision for how we contribute to philosophical progress.

And our aim is also to help philosophers be part of the broader public conversation! To that end we're also going to be launching, soon, a subcode on arXiv for philosophical foundations of AI (cs.pfai), and encouraging everyone who submits to OSPAIC to also upload their draft to arXiv (at present, use keyword PFAI).

We're also partnering with @cosmos_inst, who will be sponsoring an annual prize for the best paper on philosophy and AI, as well as helping fund the first round of the conference and Open Access publication for the volume. And with Cosmos we'll be highlighting some of the most interesting submissions to cs.pfai as they come in.

I'm the executive editor; Jeff Howard (UCL) and Rachael Sterken (University of Hong Kong) are associate editors; Ned Howells-Whitaker (JHU and Pittsburgh) is the assistant editor. We're grateful for the support of a wonderful advisory editorial board, including brilliant philosophers and computer scientists from academia, industry, and civil society.

The deadline for submissions is 11.59pm Feb 14, 2027, anywhere on earth. All details are at ospaic.org.
ospaic.org Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a deeply philosophical enterprise. The rise of highly capable general-purpose AI systems is reshaping our societies and our self-understanding in ways that demand...
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Seth Lazar Verified account @sethlazar
This is very wise, from a stellar alignment researcher (and now a colleague of mine!)
David Verified account @DavidDAfrica 17h
Why are many orgs aggressively hiring/scaling up, yet it's extremely hard to find a full time position?

Why are there calls to expand the number of people doing research in AI safety, yet our academic institutions are crumbling under the weight of the sheer number of papers and outputs?

Why are we exhorted to do research slowly and deeply, yet sped along on crunch time, with the hope that scale will clarify our confusions?

In this new blogpost (done in my personal time), I argue that these are rooted in a tension between a frame of "war mode" and "civilisation mode". This tension, in my view, creates uneasiness and despair, as well as makes it difficult to see clearly.

Check it out on LW: lesswrong.com/posts/7e38jwHh…

or on Substack: davidafrica.substack.com/p/near-horizon…
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Seth Lazar Verified account @sethlazar
Absolutely true. No point having reviewers badly and unpredictably use AI. Do the best version of AI review centrally, and have the reviewers add the human complement, which is (for now) generally about deciding what is worth paying attention to (both in the paper itself, and in its flaws)
Jessica Hullman Verified account @JessicaHullman 1d
It really is pointless and unnecessary to allow external reviewers to use AI as they want. There are obvious better alternatives.

By now, everyone should already be using AI to check their work before submitting. So what's the point of reviewers meat proxying to send more AI-generated feedback? Seemingly none.

What happens if we ban AI use in peer review? The main risk is to the imagined role of peer review as a basic soundness filter. But this is much better addressed by the venue having a centralized approach that uses validated AI tools to check that a paper is what it says it is than by individual reviewers feeding papers to LLMs using basic prompts. Such checks might include things like whether the results can be reproduced from the data/code, whether claims can be traced back to some provided evidence, whether there are TODOs left by an LLM to replace table results with non-fake data, etc.

Some of these can be used to determine if a paper should be desk rejected. Anything that is more controversial can be surfaced for reviewers.

This will shift what reviewers pay attention to, but this can be addressed by: 1) making clear to reviewers that their role is to identify what these checks miss and to weigh them, 2) being intelligent about how you select the set of LLM checks that are surfaced. See e.g., our work on learning LLM-implemented checklist that avoid adding more bias than they reduce variance. arxiv.org/pdf/2610.28666

What happened with ICLR being permissive with reviewers using AI freely is seeming pretty inexcusable.
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Seth Lazar Verified account @sethlazar
Agree with this. It's hard to know for sure when you're in the middle of it, but this does feel like an age of revolutions—something akin to the late C18. To be alive at such a time, as a political philosopher, is an extraordinary privilege.
Matthew Botvinick Verified account @mattbotvinick 3d
There are certain moments when you realize -- or immediately feel -- that history is flowing, with all of its possibility and uncertainty. Walter Benjamin's parable of the wind-blown angel. We are now on the knife edge. Will we lean ourselves toward a future of renewed democracy, with AI as a help and blessing, or toward a renewed slide toward authoritarianism, with AI as a permanent curse? I don't know. But history feels alive again, and for today that feels like enough.
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