A few years ago, my colleagues and I (includng Paul Bloom) wrote a paper with a purposely click-baitey title, “In Praise of Empathic AI”. We did this to get people to pay attention and to maybe realize that the anti-AI consensus among academics might only be a consensus among some folx on BlueSky. We were being provocative on purpose.

I just returned from a Social Psych conference and was told by one of my (philosophy-informed) critics that our title was moralizing AI, that we were praising AI morally. This was a new one to me. Is it common in philosophy to assume that when we praise something that the praise is on moral grounds? I mean can’t I praise a procedure that improves tire traction in the snow without thar praise being moral? In other words, if I wrote a paper titled “In praise of the Michelin snow tire”, is this a moral claim?