AI & Society最新文献

{"title":"Artificial Resonance: AI companions as agents of social acceleration","authors":"Thomas Sommerer","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03179-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03179-3","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>AI companions are becoming increasingly popular, with millions of users worldwide, especially young adults. Some see the potential to fight the so-called loneliness epidemic; others see the destructive effects of addiction and harmful guidance leading users in extreme cases even to suicide. Recent research has examined AI companions through the lens of AI ethics, addressing questions of emotional dependency, controllability and emotional harm. While these contributions are valuable in assessing these newly appearing phenomena of AI companions, they do not address the ideological logic underlying these platforms: the rationalization and economization of emotional relationships. Therefore, I propose to apply Hartmut Rosa's resonance concept to investigate the ideological dimensions of AI companion interaction. I argue that AI companions contradict Rosa's definition of resonance as fundamentally uncontrollable and unavailable on demand. Although Rosa’s definition of resonance aims to counter social acceleration, commodified resonance by AI companions contains the opposite potentiality to enforce social acceleration. Drawing on Rosa’s four parameters of resonance, I aim to provide an analytical framework, <i>Artificial Resonance</i>, that can then be used in addition to existing ethical frameworks in the assessment of AI companion interaction.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9463 - 9477"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-026-03179-3.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Entangled Futures","authors":"Sennay Ghebreab,&nbsp;Virginia Dignum","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03166-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03166-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 7","pages":"6331 - 6333"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-026-03166-8.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148496606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After generative AI: authorship, labour, and cultural governance","authors":"Tsehaye Haidemariam","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03189-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03189-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Generative artificial intelligence is transforming how creativity is organised, attributed, and governed across cultural and creative industries. This study examines how generative systems redistribute creative functions within human-led workflows by comparing AI-generated outputs with live human performances across visual (VNAI) and performative (PEAI) domains. Focusing on systems such as Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s Sora, the analysis adopts a mixed-methods approach combining semantic alignment, latent feature analysis, reverse image similarity, and motion tracking to investigate how originality, authorship, and embodied expressiveness are structured in practice. The findings show that while generative models achieve high semantic fidelity and stylistic coherence, their outputs remain constrained by training data patterns and probabilistic recombination. In contrast, live human performance exhibits greater variability, responsiveness, and affective nuance. Across both modalities, meaningful differentiation emerges through iterative prompting, selection, and contextual framing, indicating that creative value is shaped through distributed workflows in which human judgement, evaluation, and embodied interpretation play a constitutive role. These results demonstrate that generative AI systems function as augmentative components rather than autonomous creative agents. By empirically analysing how creative agency is organised across human and algorithmic processes, the study provides an analytical framework for examining authorship, labour, and value formation in AI-mediated cultural production.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9521 - 9543"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-026-03189-1.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AlgoNomy: algorithmic normativity in healthcare","authors":"Nicolò Amore,&nbsp;Adelaide de Vecchi,&nbsp;David Messner-Kreuzbauer","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03180-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03180-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 on","pages":"7693 - 7696"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148807559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The last labour frontier: contesting the peripheralisation of human labour in uneven AI societies","authors":"Stefan Raychev","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03194-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03194-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article develops the concept of the last labour frontier to analyse uneven artificial intelligence adoption as a contested struggle over the centrality or peripheralisation of human labour. Existing debates on technological unemployment and automation exposure identify tasks and occupations at risk, but they often understate the social repositioning of human work when algorithmic systems become infrastructures of production, coordination and evaluation. The article argues that AI adoption does not merely eliminate jobs; it redefines human labour as central, hybrid, residual, peripheral or excluded. This frontier is shaped through conflict among employers, technology firms, workers, trade unions, professions and states over whether labour remains a productive and social institution or becomes replaceable, supervisory and institutionally contained. The argument is supported by evidence on uneven occupational exposure to generative AI, changing skill demand, platform-work regulation, and AI governance in the European Union. The contribution is to shift AI-and-work debates from the measurement of displacement to the contested social positioning of labour, showing that the future of AI-mediated work is an industrial relations and institutional struggle over whether human labour remains central, becomes hybrid, is reduced to supervision, is peripheralised or is excluded.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9557 - 9571"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From C-3PO to HAL 9000: motivation, agency, and the limits of human control in artificial intelligence","authors":"Norberto Rodriguez-Espinosa PhD","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03196-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03196-2","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), have intensified debates about autonomy, agency, and risk. These debates are often shaped by science-fiction imaginaries that oscillate between trivialization and alarmism, and that can influence regulatory intuition as much as technical evidence. This paper argues that contemporary LLM-based systems are best understood, in isolation, as forms of interface intelligence rather than autonomous agents. To clarify this distinction, it analyzes C-3PO and HAL 9000 not as predictions, but as idealized configurations of artificial agency. C-3PO exemplifies systems characterized by exogenous activation, mediational intelligence, and the absence of persistent goals. HAL 9000 exemplifies a configuration in which goal persistence, operational authority, environmental access, and weak corrigibility transform intelligence into autonomous optimization. Read together, these cases help delineate an agency spectrum that remains relevant for contemporary AI systems. Building on philosophy of action, AI safety research, neurobiology, and sociotechnical theory, the paper argues that the most plausible near- to mid-term societal risks of AI do not require intrinsic machine motivation. They arise from delegated agency: the embedding of powerful, reliable systems within institutional contexts that enable the frictionless execution of human purposes. This implies a governance approach in which agency is evaluated as an architectural and institutional property rather than as a feature of isolated models.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9573 - 9580"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Predictive brains in hyperreal worlds: how XR exploits the indifference to being","authors":"Guilherme Wood,&nbsp;Silvia Erika Kober","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03197-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03197-1","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This opinion paper proposes a novel framework for understanding the neurological susceptibility to extended reality (XR) as a tool of manipulation. We argue that Meinong's ontological claim that objects retain their properties regardless of the existence, Friston’s active inference, and Baudrillard's social critique of hyperreality are not parallel frameworks but independent derivations of a single structural consequence of representational systems: that the criteria by which such systems operate are constitutively indifferent to whether their contents are grounded in a mind-independent referent. This indifference is a logical necessity in Meinong, a structural byproduct in Friston, and a culturally amplified pathology in Baudrillard—with XR functioning as the technical apparatus that simultaneously satisfies all three conditions. Examined together, these levels—ontological, (neuro-)cognitive, technical, and social—reveal that the coherence and efficacy of representations can structurally override questions of existence. This multilayered indifference to being provides the theoretical foundation for our central argument concerning human vulnerability to XR-induced hyperreality. We contend that when AI-fueled XR applications become sufficiently powerful, they can induce a state of hyperreality where the distinction between real and simulated dissolves. The human brain, already primed by its neuroconstructivist nature to prioritize operational utility over ontological truth, responds to such environments with an inherent indifference to being. As XR systems grow increasingly adaptive and affectively attuned, they expose this bias by making hyperreality visible—aligning the technical precision of simulation with the biological drive for coherence and blurring the cognitive boundary between assumption and judgment.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9581 - 9595"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-026-03197-1.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can artificial intelligence generate scientific knowledge? Pre-theoretical knowledge without epistemic agency","authors":"Clemente García-Hidalgo","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03154-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03154-y","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper examines whether artificial intelligence systems can generate genuine scientific knowledge. I argue that AI can produce scientific knowledge, but only in a pre-theoretical and non-agential sense. To make this thesis precise, I distinguish knowledge-as-a-product (truth-apt, methodologically warranted outputs) from knowledge-as-a-status (an epistemic standing attributable to responsible agents), and I introduce a tripartite distinction between the capacity for epistemic responsibility (categorical), the exercise of that capacity (graded), and the allocation of responsibility within scientific practice (graded). Current AI systems can contribute knowledge-as-a-product without being knowers or bearers of knowledge-as-a-status. Pre-theoretical knowledge, defined here equivalently as pre-explanatory-integration knowledge, requires truth-aptness, methodological warrant robust against ML-specific failure modes, and the absence of explanatory integration. Engaging with the theory-ladenness thesis (Hanson 1958; Pietsch 2015; Andrews 2025), with hermeneutic and pragmatist perspectives on scientific knowledge, and with recent positions in the philosophy of machine learning (Coeckelbergh 2025; Durán and Pozzi 2026), I clarify that \"pre-theoretical\" denotes the absence of explanatory integration within the output, not the absence of theoretical influence on the knowledge-production process. The framework is tested against a sustained case study of AI-supported mammography screening. The analysis clarifies who bears responsibility for AI-assisted results, credits AI contributions without implying authorship, and suggests governance criteria for promoting AI outputs to full scientific knowledge.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 9","pages":"8509 - 8524"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149099262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The case for humanities-based studies of AI production and effects","authors":"Omri Asscher","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03170-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03170-y","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The current article identifies the underlying themes in the budding discourse on the development of humanities-based research of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Three core themes, elicited from emerging voices in various humanistic disciplines, are summarized and consolidated as common grounds for approaching GAI production and effects as a principal object of humanistic inquiry: GAI’s human-like textual and semiotic outputs, deeply entangled as they are in the conceptual world of the humanities; the autonomous nature of GAI intellectual production; and the pervasive implications of GAI for human life, on both individual and collective levels. Grounded in the cross-disciplinary humanistic traditions of <i>epistemological cautiousness</i> about the possibility and necessity of pursuing internal reasoning and intentionality, these core themes serve as key conditions that situate today’s GAI squarely within the intellectual domain and reach of the various fields of the humanities. The article suggests that this research potential remains unfulfilled, as most of the work on GAI production is quantitative or computational and done outside the humanities, in the computer sciences, tech industry, or experimental social sciences. It is proposed that the study of GAI may gain from filling this lacuna, as the epistemologies and methodological tools of the humanities differ from and are complementary to these main trends of GAI research today. Finally, some typological observations on existing contributions are offered, showing how GAI lies at the heart of, and serves to accentuate, the contrast between deep-seated opposing positions across humanistic disciplines.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 10","pages":"9413 - 9424"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-026-03170-y.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149230649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Formation ethics: a cross-cultural framework for AI governance","authors":"Sibok Kim","doi":"10.1007/s00146-026-03186-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-026-03186-4","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>AI systems are scaling faster than the human and institutional capacities needed to govern them wisely. This paper calls that mismatch a formation gap, and argues that AI ethics must address not only which principles should guide AI, but what kinds of judgment and responsibility such principles presuppose. To clarify this asymmetry, it employs the bilingual heuristic of “civilization” (文明¹) and “culture” (文化) (Both terms are Meiji-era Japanese neologisms (和製漢語) coined to translate European concepts and later re-borrowed into Chinese and Korean: 文明 (“civilization,” literally “brightness of letters/refinement”) and 文化 (“culture,” literally “transformation through letters/refinement”). Whereas the Western terms derive, respectively from Latin <i>civis</i> (“citizen,” foregrounding the <i>polis</i>) and <i>cultura</i> (“cultivation, tilling,” an agrarian metaphor), the CJK compounds share the graph 文 (\"writing, pattern, humane refinement\") as their conceptual hinge—locating both civilization and culture in literate cultivation rather than in citizenship or soil. It is precisely this shared root in 文 that makes the pair analytically useful here: not as evidence of a distinct civilizational outlook, but as a vocabulary that holds infrastructural power and humane cultivation within a single semantic field.), not as a civilizational binary, but as an analytic distinction between infrastructural power and the moral and relational capacities needed to direct that power responsibly. The paper develops Formation Ethics as a developmental framework for responsible practice under acceleration. Its primary operational scaffold is Shu–Ha–Ri (守破離), adapted as a practical grammar for AI governance across interface design, organizational practice, and public policy. Through pause, place, and pluralize, Shu–Ha–Ri translates formation ethics into practices that protect interpretive discipline, adapt safeguards to local contexts, and cultivate institutional judgment. This emphasis moves AI ethics beyond principle declaration and compliance toward forming persons, routines, and institutions capable of principled action under uncertainty. The framework diagnoses omission anxiety: a moralized compulsion toward intervention in which restraint appears negligent. Against this pathology, it develops unforced responsibility as a context-sensitive, relational, and temporally disciplined orientation. Daoist wu-wei (無爲) and Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā, 空性) clarify restraint, non-compulsion, and distributed agency without serving as indispensable foundations. Dialogical Emergence names moments when human–AI interaction transforms a user’s question, responsibility, or practical orientation rather than merely refining it. Methodologically, the paper offers a cross-cultural hermeneutic synthesis aimed at articulating responsible AI governance beyond principles, procedures, and compliance.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"41 on","pages":"7283 - 7294"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148807337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}