AI & the Ethics of Outsourcing Intimacy
A Conversation With Max Lewis
12.00–1.30pm | Friday, November 14
Elm Library, 31 Whitney Avenue
What is wrong with completely outsourcing your heartfelt missives (e.g., love letters, anniversary cards, proposals, wedding toasts, eulogies, etc.) to generative AI? Doing so seems to violate a norm that we should craft expressions of appreciation in intimate relationships ourselves rather than outsourcing them to others—or, as is now possible, machines. What is the basis of this norm and can it survive in an age of ubiquitous AI?
Max Lewis is a lecturer in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University.
This event is open to all members of the Yale community. Lunch will be served.
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When the sun peeped over the horizon at the Wyandotte campus, I had transposed into my own writing and signed my own name to a two-hundred-and-eighty line poem entitled, simply, “To Pat.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “EPICAC”