Congratulations to the #AIES2025 best paper award winners!

The eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) is currently taking place in Madrid, Spain, running from 20-22 October. During the opening ceremony, the best papers for this year were announced. While it is well-known that AI systems might bring about unfair social impacts by influencing social schemas, much attention has been paid to instances where the content presented by AI systems explicitly demeans marginalized groups or reinforces problematic stereotypes. This paper urges critical scrutiny to be paid to instances that shape social schemas through subtler manners. Drawing from recent philosophical discussions on the politics of artifacts, we argue that many existing AI systems should be identified as what Liao and Huebner called oppressive things when they function to manifest oppressive normality.