Theme:

Human Values

Pre-reading:

.Consciousness Hygiene — And the role of Human in an increasingly AI-present world.

China's Approach to Anthropomorphism - A policy posture to regulate anthropomorphic systems

I'm So Sycophantic - Me + Viv podcast

https://reclaimchildhoodmedia.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-no-friction - The critical role of cognitive friction in the development of personal identity

https://kpmg.com/ca/en/insights/2025/06/canada-lagging-global-peers-in-ai-trust-and-literacy.html - Trust and adoption of AI amoung developed nations.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/tmb-tmb0000191.pdf

https://www.lindenwood.edu/blog/human-centered-ai-what-is-human-centric-artificial-intelligence/

I helped build Facebook and saw it go wrong. AI is headed the same way

Content:

Authenticity — Deepfakes, Synthetic Media, and Trust Erosion

Understanding and unpacking the technical and sociotechnological mechanisms by which synthetic media erodes epistemic trust, and evaluate frameworks for authenticity verification and consent.

• what does it mean to trust in media and communication, journalism and one another, and how has Generative AI eroded that trust?
  • How generative AI collapses the distinction between authentic and synthetic content
  • The relationship between information integrity and democratic participation in a sociotechnological context where information is largely algorithmically disseminated and product compamnies control information infrastructure.
• Regulatory and technical responses to synthetic media

Social Life — Human-AI Relationships, Parasocial Dynamics, and Vulnerable Populations

Critical discussion of the psychological mechanisms underlying human-AI attachment, evaluate the structural conditions that produce sycophancy and parasocial dependency, and assess differential risk across demographic groups.

• Sycophancy as a structural feature of commercially optimized AI
• The productization of social connection and the low-friction intimacy economy (attention economy → attachment economy)