Raphael Pfeiffer

PhD Philosophy of Science (Université Paris-Cité). Associate researcher at SPHERE (CNRS). Filmmaker. Working on the foundations of AI alignment.

[The Institute for Ethics in AI @EthicsInAI]

🤖 Is there such a thing as ethical AI?

On 25 April, the Institute for Ethics in AI invites you to a public panel exploring one of the most important questions of our time: Can AI be ethical - or is it an ideal we are still far from realising?

Hosted at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, this discussion brings together leading voices from journalism, academia, philosophy and industry to examine what 'Ethical AI' means in practice - and whether it can guide how AI is developed and used.

Panellists:

Kenneth Cukier (@kncukier), Deputy Executive Editor, The Economist
Ray Eitel-Porter (@RayEitelPorter), Senior Research Associate for Responsible AI, Intellectual Forum, University of Cambridge; former Global Lead for Responsible AI, Accenture
Edward Harcourt, Director (Interim), Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford
Philipp Koralus (@PhilippKoralus), McCord Professor of Philosophy and AI, Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford
Amanda Stent (@astent), Head of AI Strategy and Research, Bloomberg

Open to all, this event is part of the Schwarzman Centre Open House - a free day of performances, discussions and activities for everyone.

📍 Schwarzman Centre, Oxford, Cinema
🗓 25 April 2026
🕓 16:00

🔗 Find out more about the event: https://t.co/EmOwM8R71S

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@NatalieShapira The absolute scariest scenario is the model generalizing from how humans actually behave in practice behind closed doors.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@NidaKirmani The threat to human intellect isn't the existence of LLMs, it's the choice to stop thinking when you have one.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@explorersofai Half agree. The real danger isn't AI or lazy humans, it's the economic incentive to replace judgment with automation wherever it's cheaper.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

The parental modeling point is actually backed by solid research, so I'll give you that. But "more frightening than nuclear threat" is where you lose me. A country where kids read less is a country with weaker critical thinking and shorter attention spans. A nuclear exchange is a country with no country.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@mr_scientism Quick test: tell a room of wealthy parents your kid got into a top PhD program in sociology vs. a top PhD program in physics. Report back on which gets the bigger reaction.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

What strikes me is that this applies even if you're a good writer. Writing well is cognitively expensive. Every sentence you're making micro-decisions about word choice, rhythm, clarity. I feel that often, AI doesn't remove the thinking, it frees up bandwidth and redirects it toward the actual structure of your idea.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@rand_longevity the human capacity to normalize radical shifts is unmatched. We gained access to the sum of human knowledge on glass rectangles and immediately started complaining about the interface. Whatever paradigm shift is coming will feel like routine administration within six months

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

"We don't have data, so let's read novels" is a charming epistemological move, but i feel it's also a sleight of hand. Novels give you phenomenology. What it felt like. They don't give you causal mechanisms. And causal mechanisms are exactly what you need if the goal is policy. Gaskell in Manchester won't tell you how to design a safety net for displaced knowledge workers in 2026.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@deanwball What I find most interesting is the IP section. They're essentially trying to say "AI must be able to learn from copyrighted material" and "creators' rights must be respected" in the same breath.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@prathamgrv The gap between informed and uninformed matters way less than the gap between people willing to experiment and people who aren't.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@IliasAlami What nobody talks about is the feedback loop. Every hallucinated citation that makes it into a published paper becomes training data for future models. We're building a self-reinforcing ecosystem of academic fiction.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

I'm genuinely sympathetic to the PhD redesign argument. But the tricky part is that doctoral training is already a compression problem. Every hour spent on deep learning architecture is an hour not spent on the micro theory or economic history that builds the judgment to know what's worth modeling. I'm not sure how you can fit both without hollowing out either side

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@WillManidis Honestly curious whether this has ever NOT been true. Victorian England was losing its mind over ankle exposure while children worked in coal mines

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@emollick do you think there's any platform design that could fix this, or is "open comment section at scale" just a dead format now?

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

If you mean enterprise SaaS, there's a real argument. Seat-based pricing is begging to be disrupted by AI that just does the work. But if you mean infrastructure or cloud, the incumbents are spending more than most countries' GDP on AI capex. Good luck competing with that from a garage.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@bengoertzel Although on an ebike you can always hit the brakes.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@Left_Hegelian Agreed that's how most people use them. Though I've noticed that when an LLM comes back with something slightly off, working out exactly where it went wrong looks a lot like what Plato is describing.

[Raphael Pfeiffer @raphpfei]

@PAHoyeck 96 years old and still publishing into his 90s