This week saw researchers gather in Madrid at the eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) . As well as keynote talks, panels and poster sessions, the organisers experimented with a slightly different format for the contributed talks. All speakers in a session gave their talks, then contributed in a joint discussion on common themes, before the floor was opened to questions from the audience. We cast an eye over social media platforms to find out what participants got up to at the event. Find out what's on the agenda at #AIES2025 next week.

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.