When
Where
Join us for the College of Information Science Colloquium Series, featuring Vojko Strahovnik.
Friday, April 24, 2026
Presentation: noon - 1:00 p.m.
Coffee Chat: 1-2 p.m
Harvill 460
In-Person Only
This talk presents the initial stages of a research project on reasons-based, multidimensional, and pluralistic ethics training for large language models, motivated by the limitations of current alignment approaches that prioritize morally acceptable outputs over moral competence. The project develops a philosophically grounded framework focused on three core challenges - the facsimile problem, moral multidimensionality, and pluralism - and begins translating these into a culturally and linguistically grounded training approach, with particular relevance for sovereign language models such as the Slovene LLM GaMS. Preliminary results indicate that existing ethics training paradigms remain overly performance-oriented, normatively opaque, and English-centric, highlighting the need for a more accountable and publicly contestable model of ethical alignment.
About Vojko Strahovnik
Vojko Strahovnik is a full professor at the department of philosophy, faculty of arts, and a senior research fellow in philosophy at the faculty of theology, University of Ljubljana. He is the head of the centre for human-centred artificial intelligence and the ethics of new technologies at the University of Ljubljana. His recent outreach activities include serving as a visiting lecturer (2017, 2023), a Fulbright research scholar (2016) and a Templeton visiting researcher (2022) at the University of Arizona, department of philosophy. The primary focus of his work is the structure and phenomenology of normativity. This theme spans several philosophical fields (ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science) as well as other scientific areas, particularly cognitive science, AI research and law. The results of his research have been published in numerous scientific papers and chapters, as well as in five authored and/or edited monographs: Practical Contexts (Frankfurt, 2014), Challenging Moral Particularism (New York, 2008), Moral Judgment, Intuition and Moral Principles (Ljubljana, 2009), Moral Theory: The Nature of Morality (Maribor, 2016) and Global Ethics: Perspectives on Global Justice (Berlin, 2019).