Episode
Why AI Ethics Is Really About Who Controls Knowledge - Peter Hardi
- Podcast
- A Beginner's Guide to AI
- Published
- Aug 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2948
- Processing state
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- https://shows.acast.com/beginners-guide-to-ai/episodes/why-ai-ethics-is-really-about-who-controls-knowledge-peter-h
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Summary
AI ethics is increasingly about more than bias, safety and regulation. It may also be about who controls the knowledge that AI systems use to shape our understanding of the world. In this episode of Beginner's Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer talks with Peter Hardi , Professor Emeritus of Economics from the Central European University and a long-time specialist in business ethics, academic integrity and responsible management. Hardi became seriously interested in AI after seeing how universities were initially responding to ChatGPT. Instead of focusing primarily on detecting students who used AI, he argued that the more important question was how students and professors could use AI in ways that genuinely benefited learning and teaching. From there, his interest became much broader. To understand AI properly, Hardi went back to its foundations: mathematics, algorithms, probability, statistics, optimisation and the way these elements come together in modern AI systems. He also became fascinated by the language used to describe AI, arguing that terms such as "learning", "reasoning", "understanding" and "remembering" can make people assume that AI systems possess human-like qualities they do not actually have. The most important part of the conversation, however, is what happens when AI becomes an intermediary between people and knowledge. AI systems can distribute information at enormous scale. Hardi asks what happens when those systems begin influencing not only what people know, but also what they consider important enough to learn, preserve and pass on to future generations. That leads to one of the episode's central questions: Who decides what goes into the foundational knowledge behind AI? The discussion covers AI ethics, academic integrity, AI literacy, hallucinations…