Franck Negro

The developers of generative AI models . – Alongside the major historical players of the digital economy—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Apple—on whom they partly depend from an infrastructural, financial, and commercial standpoint—inasmuch as the latter control critical technologies (infrastructure and compute power), provide capital, and act as distribution channels—the generative AI sector includes a set of specialized developers whose core activity consists in de

The Historical Giants of the Digital Industry.  — With the exception of Nvidia, a company that remained relatively unknown to the general public before the spectacular rise of generative artificial intelligence, the principal actors currently dominating this sector are the large historical firms that emerged from the digital revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. What they share is a long-standing and structuring presence across several key digital markets, as well as the capacit

Value chain or ecosystem . - November 30, 2022 marks an important date in the history of AI with the launch of ChatGPT-3. One week later, in its December 6 edition, the newspaper Le Monde  referred to “a small company in San Francisco”—OpenAI—which had already caused a sensation a few months earlier with DALL-E 2, an AI model capable of generating ultra-realistic images from simple textual descriptions. While some were already worried about the conversational robot’s potentia

The text that follows constitutes the first installment of three articles which, in reality, form a single whole. The aim is to introduce, as didactically as possible, a number of fundamental problems in AI ethics, while also offering an overarching view. My point of departure is a text by the contemporary philosopher Thierry Ménissier, What Ethics for AI? (2019), drawn from a lecture delivered at the conference entitled “Birth and Developments of Artificial Intelligence in G

What kind of ethics does AI require? Given the radical, structural, and systemic reconfiguration—and indeed metamorphosis—that artificial intelligence brings about across the whole range of individual, social, and institutional activities, it is no longer a matter merely of calling upon the philosophical tradition to respond to the new ethical stakes raised by these transformations. Rather, we must in a sense compel philosophy to work upon itself, and to subject its historic

The Limits of Computational Ethics . - This leads us finally to examine another field of ethics, situated at the crossroads of philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, and which has tended, since the early 2000s, to become a research field in its own right: machine ethics. What Ménissier calls no longer an “ethics applied to AI,” but an “ethics integrated into AI,” in order to indicate that the goal is less to question externally the ethic

As a preliminary note . – I presented, in another article on this blog, the six characteristics of the technical world as masterfully theorized in one of the most important works in the philosophy of technology of the twentieth century: The Technological Society  ( La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle , Economica, 2008). The reading of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), an author today largely underestimated, seems to me indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand — to borrow an e

As a preliminary note . - In another article on this blog, I presented the six characteristics of the technological world as masterfully theorized in one of the most important works of twentieth-century philosophy of technology: The Technological Society (Economica, 2008). The reading of Jacques Ellul (1912–1994), an author now largely underestimated, is in my view indispensable for anyone seeking to understand—borrowing an expression from another major thinker in the philos

On January 8, 2025, the fifth edition of the Future of Jobs  report was released. Published every two years, its purpose is to track major technological, economic, and social trends in order to anticipate the global evolution of the labor market. The 2025 edition thus offers a comprehensive view of the economic, technological, geopolitical, and demographic trends that shape and will shape the global labor market over the 2025–2030 horizon; the occupations that are growing and

On June 16, 2023, a research document entitled TASRA: A Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI  was published on the arXiv website, written by Andrew Critch and Stuart Russell, two researchers specializing in AI. Stuart Russell is moreover the co-author, with Peter Norvig, of the world reference textbook in artificial intelligence used by students wishing to undertake an in-depth initiation into the discipline. In a context where AI-related extinction risks (or

Disinformation, echo chambers, and polarization . – Disinformation, defined as false information intentionally propagated with the aim of harming or causing prejudice, has become a significant threat to our democratic institutions and social stability. The development of artificial intelligence over the past decade—and more particularly the rise of generative AI since the launch of ChatGPT version 3.0—has considerably increased the possibilities for spreading disinformation,

Since our spontaneous relationship to artificial intelligence is, from the outset, technical in nature, any analysis of its ethical and societal implications should first proceed through a global characterization of the technical phenomenon itself. The etymology of the term already informs us about the phenomenon. The word “technique” derives from the noun technè, meaning “skill” or “know-how,” which gave rise in Latin to ars, the origin of the French word “art.” The meaning

At a time when artificial intelligence is entering every domain of social life, the deployment of autonomous cars offers a privileged terrain for examining some of the most fundamental questions in the ethics of artificial intelligence. These are the questions addressed by Jean-François Bonnefon’s book La voiture qui en savait trop. L’intelligence artificielle a-t-elle une morale ?  (Éditions HumenSciences – 2019). A PhD in cognitive psychology, the author is Research Directo

Drawing on the experience acquired over the past few years, and in light of an ever-growing body of studies on the effects of digital tools on human cognitive capacities, some observers are now warning about the risks of a progressive loss of autonomy that we might undergo as a result of the generalized use of artificial intelligence tools—especially generative AI. In other words, by increasingly delegating to artificial systems tasks that were previously carried out by human

In an open letter published on July 27, 2015, more than a thousand AI and robotics researchers, as well as industry figures, called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. Among the notable signatories were the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk; the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking; Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; the founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis; and the linguist Noam Chomsky. The authors propose a minimal definition of lethal autonomous weapons, distinguishing them fr

According to figures released by the streaming platform Deezer ( Le Monde , August 3, 2025), nearly 20,000 new music tracks created by tools such as Suno are uploaded every day. The problem is that these new songs—whose growing volume tends to drown out the rest of musical production—are claimed by artists who do not exist. The newspaper Le Monde  reportedly identified more than fifty “bands” likely generating their music through AI. Although platforms such as Deezer use tool

In the chapter of his book AI: Replacement or Complementarity?  devoted to the impact of artificial intelligence on employment and the labor market, Luc Ferry clearly summarizes the terms of the debate. It actually takes the form of two antinomies — or more precisely two theses that confront one another in the Kantian sense — which do not operate on the same level of analysis. On the one hand, there is a question of fact: are we, or are we not, moving toward the end of wage l

At a time when many observers are concerned about the effects of artificial intelligence on employment and the labor market, two researchers — Marion Beauvalet (Paris-Dauphine University–PSL) and Lucie Rondon du Noyer (International Research Center on Environment and Development, CIRED) — warned, in an op-ed published in Le Monde  on February 18, 2025, about the risks that the large-scale adoption of generative AI could pose to the quality of employees’ work. According to the

For the economist Malo Mofakhami, the central question is not so much whether work will disappear — because, in his view, it will — but rather to understand “who will benefit from AI, and who will bear the consequences during the transition phases.” Compared with earlier historical reorganizations of labor linked to the automation of substitutable or complementary tasks, artificial intelligence introduces a major novelty: it now affects highly qualified occupations by automat

In its geopolitics lecture of January 25, 2025, the well-known educational program revisited the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump as President of the United States, held on January 20, 2025, at the White House. The presence in the front row of major figures from the American tech industry — Elon Musk (X), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), along with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew — was seen as evidence of a sudden alignme