ΑΙhub.org
 

The Machine Ethics podcast: Companion AI with Giulia Trojano


by
08 January 2026



share this:

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology’s impact on society.

Companion AI with Giulia Trojano

This month we’re chatting with Giulia Trojano about AI as an economic narrative, companion chatbots, deskilling of digital literacy, chatbot parental controls, differences between social AI and general AI services, increasing surveillance in the guise of safety, advertising creeping into GenAI services, ReplikaAI, lack of research in emotional AI, techno-determinism, and more…

Listen to the episode here:

Listen on YouTube here:


Giulia is a competition lawyer focusing on abuse of dominance actions against Big Tech companies as well as environmental claims. She recently completed her masters in AI Ethics & Society at Cambridge and writes for several journals and academic publications on the interplay between technology, politics, society, and contemporary art. She regularly gives talks on AI ethics, law and regulation and in 2025 was recognised in the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” list.

About The Machine Ethics podcast

This podcast was created and is run by Ben Byford and collaborators. The podcast, and other content was first created to extend Ben’s growing interest in both the AI domain and in the associated ethics. Over the last few years the podcast has grown into a place of discussion and dissemination of important ideas, not only in AI but in tech ethics generally. As the interviews unfold on they often veer into current affairs, the future of work, environmental issues, and more. Though the core is still AI and AI Ethics, we release content that is broader and therefore hopefully more useful to the general public and practitioners.

The hope for the podcast is for it to promote debate concerning technology and society, and to foster the production of technology (and in particular, decision making algorithms) that promote human ideals.

Join in the conversation by getting in touch via email here or following us on Twitter and Instagram.




The Machine Ethics Podcast

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

monthly digest

AIhub monthly digest: July 2026 – time-series anomaly detection, music generation, and RoboCup in action

  29 Jul 2026
Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with AI research, events and news from the month past.

OpenAI’s models autonomously hacked a tech startup. It signals a seismic shift in cybersecurity

  28 Jul 2026
An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI’s went rogue during a security test and hacked multi-billion dollar tech startup, Hugging Face.

Towards experiment-guided AlphaFold

Researchers enhance Nobel Prize-winning structural prediction model.

AI listens in to help protect wildlife

  24 Jul 2026
Scientists are using AI systems to help track species and spot ecosystem changes.

How can we characterize consensus in a network of agents?

  23 Jul 2026
Belief Flow Networks give a logic-based way to ask not only whether connected agents will eventually agree on a shared "belief", but which final shared beliefs can emerge.

Anyone can fake a scientific image with AI, tricking even academic journals – and undermining trust in science

  22 Jul 2026
The proliferation of AI-generated science images in public spaces is not simply a misinformation problem.

AAAI presidential panel – AI and scientific integrity

  21 Jul 2026
Watch the next panel discussion in this series from AAAI.

Congratulations to the #ICML2026 award winners

  20 Jul 2026
Find out which articles have won the outstanding paper, outstanding position paper, and the test-of-time awards.



AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to AIhub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence