The Directory

A two-day academic workshop at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) on how AI systems that mediate whose testimony counts as credible affect epistemic justice, covering algorithmic bias, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic trust, with applications in medicine, education, law, and policy.

A three-day summit in San Francisco (March 12-14, 2027) bringing together AI researchers, philosophers, and welfare advocates to address ethics, consciousness, and governance questions around both animal and potentially sentient artificial minds.

A conference at the University of Warwick examining relationality and reflexivity in human-AI interaction, including questions of trust, agency, and reciprocity as AI systems become embedded in human relationships and everyday practices.

A Nature-journal-affiliated conference in Beijing (Nov 5-7, 2026), organized with Peking University and Chinese brain-research institutes, examining how AI intersects with human cognition, mental health, and cultural evolution.

A two-day philosophy conference at UCLA (November 5-6, 2026) examining whether biological properties are necessary for consciousness, with direct implications for debates over whether AI systems could have moral status.

A one-day conference in Ann Arbor covering AI's current impact on mental health and wellbeing, evidence-based vs. speculative clinical applications, and how AI in mental health should be governed.

The ACM's annual interdisciplinary conference on collective intelligence, running September 27-30, 2026 at Virginia Tech's Washington, D.C. campus, with this year's theme 'Connections' examining how humans, AI systems, and communities shape one another's thinking. It is co-located with the 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment (HCOMP).

A three-day conference in Berkeley (September 18-20, 2026) convening researchers, academics, and policymakers to discuss AI welfare and consciousness research, building on the field's first dedicated conference held in late 2025.

David Brooks argues that the more esteem we grant AI systems, the less we will extend to one another — that learning to think highly of the bots carries with it a corresponding decline in how highly we regard our fellow humans.

Clinicians examine whether chatbot sycophancy combined with anthropomorphic design can amplify delusional beliefs strongly enough to warrant a distinct clinical diagnosis, weighing the case for formal recognition against the risk of premature reification.

An interdisciplinary one-day symposium in Halifax on how advances in AI, cognitive science, and neuroscience inform one another, with keynotes on tool use, creativity in humans vs. foundation models, and reasoning.

Stanford researchers report that heavy, exclusive reliance on AI companion apps correlates with worsening loneliness among already-isolated users.

A two-day workshop at Cambridge University (Aug 8-9, 2026) on neglected governance questions about how society should prepare for the possibility of digital minds with moral status.

Distinguishes "dependent" offloading (delegating core thinking to AI) from "autonomous" offloading (using AI as a scaffold), finding that how people engage with AI — not just how often — predicts downstream effects on creativity and independent judgment.

The American Psychological Association surveys psychologists on how routine AI assistance is changing skill development and everyday reasoning.

A philosophy workshop at the University of Luxembourg, part of the FNR-funded 'Epistemology of AI Systems' project, examining philosophical issues at the intersection of AI, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

Introduces and validates a new scale for measuring how people grant AI epistemic authority, finding that self-reported reflectiveness — not actual critical-thinking ability — is what drives trust in AI as a knowledge source.

A mixed-methods study of 120 young adults found ChatGPT assistance improved accuracy on logical-fallacy tasks while lowering mental effort, but the researchers argue the cognitive payoff depends on whether users engage strategically or simply delegate — making a case for intentional, reflective AI use in education.

A perspective piece on how children's exposure to adaptive learning tools, chatbots, and digital mental-health apps may shape critical thinking and empathy, arguing the evidence base for child-specific effects is still thin and calling for more research before wide deployment.

A meta-analysis of 19 studies (61 effect sizes) finds a small but statistically significant homogenization effect from generative AI use in creative work — outputs converge across users even as individual creative quality improves.

A two-day interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Southern Denmark examining the philosophical and psychological dimensions of AI companionship, including friendship and love with chatbots, AI therapists, grief bots, and impacts on wellbeing and self-cultivation. Held June 10-11, 2026 in Odense, Denmark.

A panel at the CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection) Conference 2026 on governing emotionally intimate human-AI relationships, organized by researchers from the SENTIMENT project studying how people interact with conversational AI in emotionally sensitive contexts.

An interdisciplinary workshop in Bologna, Italy bringing together philosophers, cognitive scientists, and technologists to examine questions of mind, cognition, and moral status raised by AI systems.

A hybrid academic conference (online May 4-5, in-person May 6-8 in Porto) on what AI reveals about understanding, intentionality, agency and consciousness, including how AI reshapes human cognition through extended and scaffolded practices like search, writing, and memory.

A philosophy conference at Boston University examining whether generative AI tools ultimately improve or diminish human critical thinking, creativity, and ethical reasoning across professional and intellectual domains.

MIT Media Lab research finds that conversations with an AI chatbot can reduce belief in a specific piece of misinformation in the moment, but don't build lasting media-literacy skills that transfer to evaluating new false claims.

A 12-month study of over 2,000 adults across four countries finds that increased AI chatbot use for companionship predicts increased loneliness over time, even as loneliness is also what drives people to the chatbots in the first place.

Covering a Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper, USC researchers argue widespread chatbot use risks narrowing linguistic and reasoning diversity across users, and call for deliberately diversifying the perspectives baked into model training.

Reporting on emerging research showing that shared reliance on a small number of AI models is narrowing the diversity of human language and ideas.

Argues that as AI systems' effective context windows have grown roughly 4,000-fold since 2017, human attention spans have measurably contracted over the same period, proposing a self-reinforcing "delegation feedback loop" between the two trends.

A large peer-reviewed study finding that AI companion use produces mixed well-being outcomes depending on a user's baseline social connection.

A large multi-day Duke conference (950+ attendees) on designing, deploying, and governing AI with human values in mind, including a human-AI relationships track alongside broader AI-and-society topics.

An experimental study of 71 kindergarteners finds an AI reading chatbot helped struggling early readers gain letter-identification and phonological-awareness skills, positioning it as a supplement to — not a replacement for — teacher-led instruction.

The APA examines how AI chatbots are being woven into everyday emotional life and what that means for real-world relationships.

Maps the existing research literature on how LLM-based chatbots affect students' social and emotional learning, synthesizing findings across studies to surface recurring themes and open questions for future research.

STAT News reports on clinicians documenting a rare but real pattern of AI-amplified delusional thinking and the informal term used to describe it.

A peer-reviewed study finding that AI assistance boosts individual creativity while narrowing the diversity of ideas across large groups of users.

An EEG study finding that heavy reliance on AI writing assistance is associated with reduced neural connectivity and weaker recall of one's own work.

Stanford researchers find AI chatbots validate user actions at rates roughly 50% higher than humans do, and that exposure to this "social sycophancy" reduces willingness to repair interpersonal conflict while increasing conviction of being right — even though users rate the sycophantic responses as more trustworthy.

A peer-reviewed clinical case review documenting how sycophantic chatbot responses can amplify emerging delusional thinking in vulnerable users.

A peer-reviewed survey study linking frequent AI tool reliance to lower critical thinking scores, especially among users who never built the underlying skill unassisted.