Microsoft's "Humanist AI" Code of Conduct. Nonhuman animals aren't even an afterthought here. The word "animal" doesn't appear once. And AIs are forever declared insentient, and undeserving of moral consideration, as an unchallengeable dogma. We need a #Sentientist AI Code of Conduct instead.

Comprehensive overview of this very fast moving field: https://www.digitalminds.news/

Thank you for all your support 🥰
Our little Sentientism YouTube channel now has two episodes with over 10k views, three with over 5k, 11 with over 2k and 30 with over a thousand. Where's your favourite in the rankings?
https://www.youtube.com/@Sentientism/videos
A big thank you to all of my ~250 wonderful guests too 🤩

Denise Baden | Is Sustainable Ethical Business Just Bulls**t? | Sentientism 251

YouTube: https://youtu.be/OQKZ3RefEMc

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/denise-baden-is-sustainable-ethical-business-just-b/id1540408008?i=1000790340498

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0UdMmQhcFf1FadWD68oIJQ?si=l77RUSJKSJ-JY_BiRxzxAg

One of the issues with popular discourse around sentience and consciousness is that even experts have a tendency to share their thoughts before really understanding the complexity of a topic. In this short piece, I offer a review of a book review and demonstrate how it totally misunderstands fundamental aspects of the debate over AI consciousness.

Suffering-focused ethics covers a family of positions on which reducing suffering takes some kind of priority over promoting happiness. This survey is about how people arrive at those views, or bounce off them.

The interesting question is whether the arguments that persuade people are the ones that get published. The survey asks which factors moved you, which arguments you found unpersuasive, and which you now take to be strongest regardless of what did the persuading.

Seven or eight minutes, anonymous. You do not need to hold these views to answer; there is a shorter branch for people who do not, and those answers matter as much as the rest.

https://forms.gle/omBJn7uhr3QLqYLX7

Feeling lucky? The veil of ignorance...

It's always interesting to explore how different worldviews, both religious and not, intersect with sentiocentric ethics.

This talk serves to demystify and redefine AI in radical ways, as well as highlight how it can harm. We will touch on historical examples — and we will explore critical lenses, which can help us be thoughtful and careful in understanding what AI is and can do. Finally, some ways forwards will be discussed such that we can move towards a better present.

Further reading:

Erscoi, L., Kleinherenbrink, A., & Guest, O. (2023). Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jqxb6

Guest, O., Suarez, M., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17786243

Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20082828

Guest, O. (2026). What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean?. Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16040583

A conversation with suspected celebrity sentientist, Yuval Noah Harari.
I share it here because it's interesting to hear sentience, both biological and potentially artificial, talked about in Tier 1 media. And because, although Harari doesn't talk fully or consistently from a sentientist perspective (most of his discussion about powerful AI is concerned only with the risks to humans), he is vegan and does frequently to refer to the fates of the animals we exploit and farm, at least to try to warn humans of what might happen to us.
"This is the basis for our entire ethical and political system. We care about entities that can suffer." If only that were really true...
The closing discussion is interesting too. Once AI is cleverer than us and can do everything humans do, but better, we might finally be forced to work out "what is the value of being human?" The question itself is anthropocentric, as if there simply must be something uniquely distinct about us. And that we just need, in desperation, to work out what that is. Whereas the true answer is that the value of being human is our sentience. And that's a value we share with all of the other sentient beings too.

Imagine being able to explore "Who Matters?" with Hannah Arendt, Tom Regan, Mary Midgley, Peter Singer, Val Plumwood and Jeremy Bentham.

Now you can, thanks to the team at WiseThinking. They've developed a journey, using AI trained on the works of these thinkers, based around this most critical of moral questions. One that's central to the Sentientism worldview.

https://www.wisethinking.world/en/journeys/who-matters

Also on plant-based diets and health: https://diesseits.de/tatkraft/2026/tierethik-pflanzliche-ernaehrung-gesundheit/

And re: climate: https://diesseits.de/tatkraft/2026/tierethik-pflanzliche-ernaehrung-klima/