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Record W2182280653 · doi:10.29173/irie347

Ethical subjectification and search engines: ethics reconsidered

2005· article· en· W2182280653 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Tobias Blanke

Bibliographic record

VenueThe International Review of Information Ethics · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEthics and Social Impacts of AI
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDisadvantageRelevance (law)Relation (database)SubjectificationPsychologyEngineering ethicsSocial psychologyComputer scienceEpistemologyPolitical scienceLawEngineeringPhilosophyArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article will explore the relation of search engines to the freedom they invoke in human subjects. Away from questions about the social impact of search engines and their ethical use, it shall investigate the influence of search engines on ethical subjectifications. The article will criticise the common critique that search engines should only deliver neutral and objective results to their users, where ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ are defined as anti-subjective. On the contrary, it will argue that search engines are designed to deliver subjective results. A possible ethical critique starts therefore where they fail to do so. Due to reasons immanent to the technology, search engines are never subjective enough in their relevance decisions. Their results collide at the same time with what their users expect them to deliver. The article will show that, far from being a disadvantage, this disagreement between the users’ expectations and the search engines results is what triggers an ethical subjectification.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.114
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.157
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.114
Threshold uncertainty score0.604

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1140.157
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0090.101
Scholarly communication0.0220.027
Open science0.0020.010
Research integrity0.0220.017
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.124
GPT teacher head0.453
Teacher spread0.329 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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