AI Ethics
The human side of AI — bias, privacy, societal impact, and governance. ALAN asks the hard questions about who benefits and who pays the cost.
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Biased Training Data and Patch-Level Attacks: The Ethical Risks of Vision Transformers in High-Stakes Systems
Vision Transformers deployed in healthcare and surveillance inherit bias from web-scraped datasets. From LAION to …
The Concentration Problem: Who Can Afford to Train Trillion-Parameter MoE Models and What That Means for AI Access
Trillion-parameter MoE models promise efficiency through sparse activation. But training costs keep rising, and the …
Amplified Bias and Opaque Connections: The Ethical Risks of Graph Neural Networks in High-Stakes Decisions
Graph neural networks judge people by connections. When those relationships encode historical inequality, bias amplifies …
Synthetic Faces and Learned Distributions: The Ethical Risks When VAEs Recreate Private Data
Variational autoencoders can memorize and recreate private training data. Why synthetic faces and medical records are …
Sequential Bias and Opaque Memory: The Ethical Risks of Recurrent Networks in High-Stakes Decisions
RNNs carry opaque sequential memory into high-stakes decisions. Explore why hidden states resist auditing and what that …
The Black Box Problem: Why Neural Network Opacity Undermines Accountability in LLM Decisions
Neural networks powering LLM decisions are opaque by design. This essay traces why that opacity creates an …
Trained on Bias, Deployed on Faces: The Ethical Cost of CNN-Powered Surveillance Systems
CNN-powered facial recognition hits 98% on benchmarks but fails along racial and gender lines. The ethical cost of …
Who Decides What Gets Measured: The Accountability Gap in Standardized LLM Evaluation
Standardized LLM evaluation harnesses shape which AI models succeed, yet their design choices go unaudited. Explore the …
Inflated Scores, Misplaced Trust: The Ethical Cost of Benchmark Contamination in AI Procurement
Inflated benchmark scores shape AI procurement in healthcare and finance. An ethical examination of contamination, …
Selective Reporting and Missing Baselines: How Incomplete Ablation Undermines AI Research Credibility
Selective ablation reporting hides whether AI breakthroughs are real. Explore how missing baselines erode research trust …
The Benchmark Trap: How MMLU Optimization Drives Data Contamination and Rewards Western Academic Bias
MMLU scores dominate AI headlines, but data contamination and cultural bias undermine what they actually measure. An …
Accuracy Theater: How Confusion Matrices Obscure Bias in High-Stakes AI Decisions
Overall accuracy hides who bears the cost of AI errors. Explore how confusion matrices obscure racial and gender bias in …
Who Decides What Good Means: Cultural Bias and Power Asymmetry in LLM Benchmarks
LLM benchmarks encode their creators' cultural values. Explore how geographic bias, moral stereotyping, and power …
Who Decides Toxicity? Bias, Overcensorship, Power in AI Safety
AI toxicity classifiers embed cultural bias, creating disparate censorship of marginalized communities. Examine how …
Optimizing for the Wrong Number: How F1 Score Masks Disparate Impact in High-Stakes Classification
F1 score can mask racial and gender bias in hiring and criminal justice. Learn why aggregate metrics fail fairness and …
Fairness by Numbers: When Bias Metrics Mask Structural Inequality Instead of Fixing It
Fairness metrics promise objectivity but can mask structural inequality. Learn why statistical parity fails to deliver …
Whose Preferences Count: How Reward Models Encode Bias and Shape What LLMs Refuse to Say
Reward models encode human preferences into LLM behavior — but whose preferences? Examine how annotator bias, preference …
Who Gets to Break the Model: Power, Access, and Accountability Gaps in AI Red Teaming
AI red teaming promises safety through adversarial testing, but who selects the testers, defines harm, and bears …
When AI Lies Confidently: Liability, Disclosure, and the Unsolved Ethics of LLM Hallucination
LLM hallucination is no longer a quality bug. It is a liability, disclosure, and governance problem. Explore who bears …
Request Queues and GPU Access: Who Waits Longest When Continuous Batching Decides
Continuous batching boosts GPU throughput, but its scheduling quietly decides who waits. Examining fairness, priority, …
Opaque Defaults and Locked Knobs: The Ethics of Who Controls LLM Sampling Parameters
Major LLM providers are locking sampling parameters like temperature and top-p. Explore who controls these defaults, …
Compressed Intelligence, Unequal Access: The Hidden Costs of Quantized AI
Quantization makes AI accessible but the quality loss isn't evenly distributed. Explore who benefits from compressed …
Always-On AI: The Environmental Price and Access Inequality of Large-Scale Inference
AI inference runs 24/7 on energy, water, and carbon. The environmental cost is real, the access gap is widening, and …
The Scaling Tax: Energy Consumption, Data Monopolies, and Concentrated AI Power
Scaling laws promise better AI through more compute, but the energy, water, and capital costs concentrate power among …
Copyright, Carbon, and Consent: The Ethical Price of Training on Trillions of Tokens
AI pre-training extracts creative work and burns through environmental resources at industrial scale, all without …
Biased Training Data, Copyright Gray Zones, and Accountability Gaps in Fine-Tuned LLMs
Fine-tuning LLMs raises ethical risks: biased data, copyright gray zones, and no clear accountability. Who bears …
Annotator Exploitation, Preference Bias, and the Hidden Human Cost of RLHF Alignment
RLHF alignment relies on annotators paid poverty wages to label traumatic content. Explore the ethical cost of …
Sentence Embeddings: Frozen Bias in High-Stakes Decisions
Embeddings freeze gender, racial, and cultural bias from their training data. These frozen geometries then shape all …
Finer-Grained Search, Higher Barriers: Who Multi-Vector Retrieval Leaves Behind
Multi-vector retrieval boosts search quality but demands infrastructure few can afford. Who benefits from finer-grained …
Approximate by Design: What Gets Lost When Vector Indexing Decides Which Results You See
Approximate nearest neighbor search silently drops results. In hiring, healthcare, and legal systems, that design …