I started to write a post about Open AI's drop of more than 700 AI-generated math papers, but I got distracted by something else. In the meantime, they've started to unravel.

A report by the secretary-general warned that new technologies could be used to access and criminalize people’s innermost thoughts.

I'm continuously discovering new cover versions. Here are some recent encounters I recommend.

Last week, I encountered a Gettier case in the wild. Edmund Gettier wrote a very short paper in 1963 arguing against the plausible idea that knowledge is justified true belief. He provides two cases where someone has a justified true belief which doesn't count as knowledge. His examples are somewhat contrived, but they suffice to make the point.

I am teaching Philosophy and Cover Songs as a first-year seminar this semester, and I worry that I don't have any contemporary examples. It's weird, because I had lots of contemporary examples when taught Philosophy and Popular Music a year and a half ago. New covers of Chappell Roan's "Good Luck Babe" (itself just a year old) provided vivid examples of the way gender and meaning interact.

Two small updates recently: Posted a slightly revised version of my paper on covers for a contemporary debates volume. My paper with Ron McClamrock on collapse phenomena in musical experience has been accepted at the Journal of Aesthetic Education. We're told that it won't appear in an issue until probably 2028 or '29, but the draft is available now.

AI alignment is the project of making AI so that it won't kill us or sell us out. A naïve conception adds a constitution or statement of principles, basically one more document to start the prompt for an LLM's linguistic riffing. That makes the mistake of thinking that the danger is superintelligent or rogue AI, as if the AI are people need to be raised to know the difference between right and wrong.

Over at the blog of the American Philosophical Association, I rant a bit about how using chatbots shirks the work of philosophical writing and reading. You can read it over there (by clicking the link) or here (below the fold). It's part of the APA's AI and Teaching series. Thanks to Will Fraker, who edits the series, for some helpful pushback on bits here and there.

Irregular, an Israeli start-up, worked with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to assess the security of their A.I. models. It made a mistake. Then the tests went off the rails.

In contemporary music, the recorded track is the musical object that listeners encounter the most. Some philosophers, like Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, have taken this to mean that the track is the work of art in contemporary music. Evidence for this is the importance that many musicians put on production of the track. So much so that producers become important contributors to the musical product.

A propos almost nothing, today I discovered Brandi Carlile's lovely rendition of "Fairytale of New York" from last December.