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26Now you see me, now you don’t: an exploration of religious exnomination in DALL-EEthics and Information Technology 26 (2): 1-13. 2024.Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used not only to classify and analyze but also to generate images and text. As recent work on the content produced by text and image Generative AIs has shown (e.g., Cheong et al., 2024, Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023), there is a risk that harms of representation and bias, already documented in prior AI and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms may also be present in generative models. These harms relate to protected categories suc…Read more
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18Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop 2023 (28/09/2023).
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50Existentialism on Social Media: The ‘Look’ of the ‘Crowd’Journal of Human-Technology Relations 1. 2023.Social media has become a basis for helping us maintain human contact, especially as our alienation from our phenomenological experiences of ‘being human’ is becoming apparent due to the pandemic. I argue for how existentialist philosophy is crucial, more than ever, to interrogate our social media usage, which is a ‘necessary evil’ in our daily lives. Firstly, Kierkegaard’s critiques of the crowd and of the press are equally applicable to social media, which plays both roles: enabling an anonymo…Read more
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58Exploring intellectual humility through the lens of artificial intelligence: Top terms, features and a predictive modelActa Psychologica 238 (103979). 2023.Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms and features that indicate…Read more
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1320Investigating gender and racial biases in DALL-E Mini ImagesAcm Journal on Responsible Computing. forthcoming.Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper, we systematically review the extent to which DALL-E Mini suffers from this problem. In line with the Model Card published alongside DALL-E Mini by i…Read more
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Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19PLoS ONE 12 (17). 2022.Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republi…Read more
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250Attention and counter-framing in the Black Lives Matter movement on TwitterHumanities and Social Sciences Communications 9 (367). 2022.The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists’ claims in a more sinister light. The ability to bring about social change depends on the balanc…Read more
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348A tragic coalition of the rational and irrational: a threat to collective responses to COVID-19Philosophical Psychology (6). 2022.There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to …Read more
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548Ethical Dilemmas for @Celebrities: Promoting #Intimacy, Facing #Inauthenticity, and Defusing #InvectivenessEthical Perspectives 29 (1): 139-166. 2022.The rise of social-media-mediated celebrity culture raises several philosophical concerns. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see, for example, Hollywood actors being placed in the same bracket as YouTube artists and Instagram influencers. The increased perceived ‘connectivity’ afforded by social media allows online celebrities to reach more fans and increases the perceived engagement or intimacy in the fan-celebrity relationship. In this paper I argue that this online relationship, which is benef…Read more
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346The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkitIn Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1, Springer. 2023.The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter…Read more
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24“AI Assistants.” Roberto Pieraccini, 2021, MIT Press (review)Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies 32 (1): 1-4. 2022.
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A Tale of Two Anti-HeroesIn Christian Cotton & Andrew M. Winters (eds.), Neon Genesis Evangelion and Philosophy, Open Universe. 2022.This book chapter in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Philosophy (Open Universe) draws parallels between the main anti-heroes in Albert Camus's The Stranger and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and introduces common existential concepts such as facticity/transcendence and bad faith, aimed at a general readership.
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39Book review: Luca Possati (2021): “The algorithmic unconscious: how psychoanalysis helps in understanding AI” (Routledge) (review)AI and Society 39 (2): 819-821. 2024.
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270The Affiliative Use of Emoji and Hashtags in the Black Lives Matter Movement in TwitterSocial Science Computer Review (N/A). 2022.Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platf…Read more
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443To Honor our Heroes: Analysis of the Obituaries of Australians Killed in Action in WWI and WWII2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2021.Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular…Read more
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364Varying degrees of symmetry can exist in a social network's connections. Some early online social networks (OSNs) were predicated on symmetrical connections, such as Facebook 'friendships' where both actors in a 'friendship' have an equal and reciprocal connection. Newer platforms -- Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's 'Pages' inclusive -- are counterexamples of this, where 'following' another actor (friend, celebrity, business) does not guarantee a reciprocal exchange from the other. This paper …Read more
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79Guest Editors' Introduction: Examining Moral Emotions in Nietzsche with the Semantic Web Exploration Tool: NietzscheJournal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (1): 1-10. 2019.Five years ago, the Journal of Nietzsche Studies published a special issue on Nietzsche and the affects. In it, Aurelia Armstrong wrote generically about the passions, Michael Ure discussed Schadenfreude, Joanne Faulkner addressed disgust, and Joseph Kuzma focused on eroticism.1 In subsequent issues, authors have discussed love,2 emotion in general,3 resentment,4 compassion,5 honor and empathy,6 and affect in general.7 This special section on emotions and reactive attitudes is a chance to take s…Read more
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456The concept of 'authenticity' is highly valued on social media sites (SMSes), despite its ambiguous nature and definition. One interpretation of 'authenticity' by media scholars is a human's congruence with online portrayals of themselves (e.g. posting spontaneous photographs from their lives, or using real biodata online). For marketers and 'influencers', these patterns of behaviour can achieve certain gains: sales for a business, or success of a campaign. For existentialist philosophers, using…Read more
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1101Technological Seduction and Self-RadicalizationJournal of the American Philosophical Association (3): 298-322. 2018.Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technol…Read more
Monash University
PhD, 2013
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence |
Computers in Philosophy |
Existentialism |
PhilPapers Editorships
Technology Ethics, Misc |
Existentialism, Misc |