AI Gossip

The Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person talk presented by Joel Krueger at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, on 20 February 2025 1:00 - 2:30 PM with lunch during the break.

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip?

Drawing on recent work with Lucy Osler, I argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, I focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms — what we call "technosocialharms" — that follow from it.

About the speaker:

Joel is a philosopher at the University of Exeter. He works in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science: specifically, issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended)cognition, including emotions, social cognition, loneliness, psychopathology, and human-AI interactions. Sometimes, he also writes about comparative philosophy and philosophy of music. He is an Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE).

This event will be chaired by Dr Marco Bernini from the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.

Download the Epiphany 2025 NCL Events Programme

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details will be circulated closer to the event.