University of Texas at Austin
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2023
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Areas of Specialization
Technology Ethics
Aesthetics
  •  8
    Video Game Fictions: A Dual-Work View
    Journal of the Philosophy of Games 4 (1). 2022.
    Video games fictions are interactive: some of the content is set by the game designer and some is set by the player. However, philosophers disagree over how this interaction is reflected within the fictional content of video games. First, I will show that games and playthroughs are two distinct works of fiction with their associated fictional content. Second, I argue that players engage with both fictional works when playing a video game. They imagine the fictional truths associated with the gam…Read more
  •  16
    Public understanding of artificial intelligence through entertainment media
    with Paul Toprac, Suzanne Scott, and Samuel Baker
    AI and Society 1-14. forthcoming.
    Artificial intelligence is becoming part of our everyday experience and is expected to be ever more integrated into ordinary life for many years to come. Thus, it is important for those in product development, research, and public policy to understand how the public’s perception of AI is shaped. In this study, we conducted focus groups and an online survey to determine the knowledge of AI held by the American public, and to judge whether entertainment media is a major influence on how Americans …Read more
  •  30
    Folk Theories and User Strategies on Dating Apps
    with Min Kyung Lee
    In iConference 2022: Information for a Better World: Shaping the Global Future, . pp. 445-458. 2022.
    The goal of this paper is to understand the experience of users with algorithmic filtering on dating apps by identifying folk theories and strategies that users employ to maximize their success. The research on dating apps so far has narrowly focused on what we call algorithmic pairing–an explicit pairing of two users together through a displayed compatibility score. However, algorithms behind more recent dating apps work in the background and it is not clear to the user if and how algorithmic f…Read more
  •  62
    Dating through the filters
    Social Philosophy and Policy 37 (2): 237-248. 2020.
    In this essay, I explore ethical considerations that might arise from the use of collaborative filtering algorithms on dating apps. Collaborative filtering algorithms can predict the preferences of a target user by looking at the past behavior of similar users. By recommending products through this process, they can influence the news we read, the movies we watch, and more. They are extremely powerful and effective on platforms like Amazon and Google. Recommender systems on dating apps are likel…Read more
  •  49
    Virtual competitions and the gamer’s dilemma
    Ethics and Information Technology 22 (3): 239-245. 2020.
    This paper expands Rami Ali’s dissolution of the gamer’s dilemma (Ethics Inf Technol 17:267-274, 2015). Morgan Luck’s gamer’s dilemma (Ethics Inf Technol 11(1):31-36, 2009) rests on our having diverging intuition when considering virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. Virtual murder is seemingly permissible, when virtual child molestation is not and there is no obvious morally relevant difference between the two. Ali argues that virtual murder and virtual child molestation …Read more