They Might Be Self-Aware: AI News & Culture
They Might Be Self-Aware: AI News & Culture
Daniel Bishop, Hunter Powers, The Blur
AI Companies Are Hiring Philosophers and Uncensored AI Faces a Legal Test
30 minutes Posted Jul 6, 2026 at 10:05 am.
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AI companies are hiring philosophers, and researchers just tested uncensored AI on Swiss Supreme Court cases the big chatbots refuse to read. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop take the philosopher hiring story seriously: why OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly want philosophy majors (now more likely to be employed than computer science grads), and why AI alignment keeps looking like brainwashing a very smart high schooler that knows it is being tested. Then TF-RefusalBench, a benchmark built from real Swiss Federal Supreme Court criminal rulings, catches aligned models refusing legitimate legal work, and the workaround is uncensored, abliterated AI models with the refusals edited out of their weights. The researchers' catch: a model that cannot say no also gets less truthful. Torture, it turns out, does not work on people or on large language models.