Institute of Philosophy and DSIT: AI Assistants — Tools or Colleagues

Panel: Dr Ben Henke, Prof Murray Shanahan, Prof Nick Shea, Prof Ophelia Deroy

Chair: Prof Barry Smith

A high-level orientation to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI assistants: what they are becoming, how they shape human decision-making, and why they are increasingly treated as collaborators rather than tools.

The emphasis is not on technical training but on giving policy makers a clear, conceptually grounded way of understanding these systems and the questions they raise.

We will highlight what is genuinely new in contemporary AI, what is merely a rebranding of familiar ideas, and where the real inflection points lie as these systems are deployed across public and private sectors.