AI labs are buying Kant by the seat at $350k base
The Economist says philosophy departments are "haemorrhaging" staff to AI firms writing model constitutions. The thread's reaction: name the rate, then ask what the job actually is.
The split that matters is hidden in the piece: Anthropic's constitution leans Kantian deontology (hard rules against lying and coercion), while OpenAI's and Google's models tilt consequentialist, weighing costs and benefits.
Then a philosopher in the thread flips the premise. The labs don't want someone who finds fault, he argues; they want someone to affirm whatever needs affirming. PR, priced cheaper than a $6B acquihire.
A $350k job description with the word "philosopher" in it
The Economist's argument (the piece sits behind a paywall, so the thread does the quoting) is that ten years after humanities students were told to "learn to code," the AI labs are running the trade in reverse: hiring academic philosophers to help write the ethical "constitutions" that govern model behaviour. Dr Floridi, quoted in the article, calls the scale of departures from philosophy departments a "haemorrhaging."
The substance is an ethics fork, and a reader pulled the exact passage into the thread:
"Anthropic's constitution incorporates many deontological strictures… Models more sympathetic to consequentialism include OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini." — a commenter quoting the article (TFA)
Deontology (Kant) imposes flat prohibitions on lying and coercion even for a greater good; consequentialism weighs costs against benefits. The article's claim is that this academic distinction is now shipping inside frontier models.
The people being hired say the job is to affirm, not to object
The sharpest pushback came from people who hold the credential. A self-described philosopher questioned the actual function:
"it seems often like they're there to affirm whatever needs to be affirmed, rather than doing the philosopher's actual role of finding extreme fault in whatever you're doing…" — a working philosopher
A UCLA philosophy-and-logic graduate cooled the gold-rush framing from the other side, noting the bar is publication, not enthusiasm:
"Usually you need to be well-published/cited in the field, so a minor would likely not qualify." — a UCLA philosophy/logic alum
Others read the whole trend as cheap publicity. One pointed out the math directly:
"that PR is cheaper than buying Johnny Ives for $6 billion. You could probably buy an entire Ivy League philosophy department for 60 million." — a commenter pricing the PR play
And someone who actually worked under this arrangement reported the empty middle of it:
"I worked for probably the best-known… all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage." — a former employee of an AI-VFX house with an in-house ethicist
The unresolved tension isn't whether philosophy belongs near AI. It's that a discipline built to dismantle your axioms is being hired by the people who set them, and salaried roles tend to align with the paycheck before they align with the argument.
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