Elizabeth K. Stewart

ABOUT

I am a philosopher interested in trust, trustworthiness, Artificial Intelligence, and online speech. I graduated with a Ph.D in Philosophy at the University of South Carolina in May 2022. I hold a B.S in Psychology. I also have an MSc in psycholinguistics from the University of Edinburgh. I am currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego, but will be joining the philosophy department at the University of Canterbury as a lecturer in June of 2023. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Howard University. My current research focuses on connecting the philosophical literature on trust and trustworthiness to current issues in ethics of AI.

In my dissertation, I developed a framework for assessing the trustworthiness of AI-infused technologies, specifically chatbots for mental health. I centered questions of human vulnerability in arguing that trustworthiness is a context-dependent property. Thus an agent may be trustworthy relative to one individual or group, but not another. I am particularly interested in cases where a technology may be considered trustworthy in one culture, but not another.

My other research interests include philosophy of information, information ethics, and the regulation of digital technologies. My 2021 article “Detecting Fake News: Two Problems for Content Moderation” was published online in Philosophy and Technology.