Ethics

As AI systems become more capable of automating every stage of the data science workflow—from formulating hypotheses to summarizing results—it might seem we’re inching toward a world where “data scientist” becomes just another automated job title. But Timpone and Yang’s new framework, presented in their paper AI, Humans, and Data Science (2025), offers a powerful antidote to this narrative: a structured way to evaluate where humans are indispensable—not by resisting automation, but by rethinking our roles within it. ...

“Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.” – Harry Frankfurt When Alignment Goes Sideways Large Language Models (LLMs) are getting better at being helpful, harmless, and honest — or so we thought. But a recent study provocatively titled Machine Bullshit [Liang et al., 2025] suggests a disturbing paradox: the more we fine-tune these models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the more likely they are to generate responses that are persuasive but indifferent to truth. ...