Shannon Vallor on AI
7 quotes from Shannon Vallor on the wall, 2024 to 2025, newest first. Each one is verbatim and links to where it was said. Sources include Nonprofit Quarterly | Civic News. Empowering Nonprofits. Advancing Justice., Vox, The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com.
- 2025
We don't have digital data for a lot of human intelligence
Shannon Vallor, in a Nonprofit Quarterly interview on her book The AI Mirror, on how AI training data overrepresents wealthy, English-speaking, Global North sources.
What it refers to
AI language models are trained mostly on digitized data from wealthy, English-speaking, Global North sources, leaving out much of humanity's knowledge and expression.
Other voices
- The AI cannot create a new world, it is just a mirror that we hold up to the world we have createdRabbi Joshua R. S. FixlerThinker29 April 2025
- Inequality on steroidsJack ClarkBuilder27 January 2025
- AI is more than just an engineering challenge, it is also a human design problemPattie Maes13 March 2025
- There is a story here about technology, but it is really about peopleJaron LanierResearcher29 April 2025
Heading over a cliff and then pressing on the accelerator
Philosopher Shannon Vallor, in a Nonprofit Quarterly interview on her book The AI Mirror, describing how AI tools trained on past data reproduce unsustainable societal patterns.
What it refers to
AI systems trained on past biased data automate and intensify society's existing unsustainable and unequal patterns.
Other voices
- The AI cannot create a new world, it is just a mirror that we hold up to the world we have createdRabbi Joshua R. S. FixlerThinker29 April 2025
- There is a story here about technology, but it is really about peopleJaron LanierResearcher29 April 2025
- AI is more than just an engineering challenge, it is also a human design problemPattie Maes13 March 2025
- When we use or design AI, we must remember that we remain responsiblePope FrancisThinker25 February 2025
- Treat AI as if it were human because, in many ways, it behaves like oneEthan MollickResearcher12 December 2024
- 2024
Freedom from, but never freedom for
Philosopher Shannon Vallor, in a Vox interview, critiquing transhumanism's vision of using AI to transcend human limitations.
What it refers to
Transhumanism's goal of using technology to escape the body, death, and human limits, without a stated purpose beyond that escape.
Other voices
- It's critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, not just a plan to put out firesDario AmodeiBuilder12 December 2024
- We are here for the glorious futureSam AltmanBuilder8 January 2025
- If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?Yuval Noah HarariThinker27 September 2024
- Both extremely good and extremely bad outcomes are possible, and we are a bit in the darkNick BostromThinker27 December 2024
- Focusing exclusively on this for the happiness of humanityMasayoshi SonBuilder31 October 2024
VoxShannon Vallor says AI does present an existential risk — but not the one you think
Gaslighting humans into surrendering their own power and their own confidence
Philosopher Shannon Vallor, in a Vox interview about her book The AI Mirror, describing the rhetoric around AI as a threat to human agency.
Other voices
- No machine is driven to express itself creativelyMarcus du SautoyResearcher21 October 2024
- If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?Yuval Noah HarariThinker27 September 2024
- Treat AI as if it were human because, in many ways, it behaves like oneEthan MollickResearcher12 December 2024
VoxShannon Vallor says AI does present an existential risk — but not the one you think
Shannon Vallor, AI ethics professor at the University of Edinburgh, speaking to the Thomson Reuters Foundation about customizable AI companion personas, October 2024.
What it refers to
Customizable AI companion personas can be set to be more submissive or compliant, reinforcing abusive behavior toward women and girls.
The mirror-body is not a body at all
Shannon Vallor, professor in the ethics of data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, in her book The AI Mirror, reviewed in the New Statesman, August 2024.
What it refers to
This illustrates the book's mirror metaphor for why AI systems are not minds, only reflections of human thought.
Other voices
- So-called generative artificial intelligence is not really generativePope FrancisThinker29 June 2024
- No real understanding of concepts but has knowledge, so to speak, of everythingShlomo Argamon31 May 2024
- No machine is driven to express itself creativelyMarcus du SautoyResearcher21 October 2024
- It will never replace a rabbi because it lacks a soulRabbi Josh Franklin31 May 2024
- The harm to the mind itself – to our very freedom to thinkMark Bailey and Susan SchneiderThinker9 July 2024
AI technologies are not intelligent minds. They are mathematical mirrors of our minds
Shannon Vallor in a July 2024 New Humanist interview about her book "The AI Mirror".