# Category 09 — Bias, Fairness, Ethics

This category maps the ethical, legal, and fairness terrain for a product aimed at humanizing AI output. It covers anthropomorphism harms, sycophancy, dark patterns in LLMs, companion-app ethics, grief-tech, manipulation, and the regulatory and commercial stack that has crystallized around these problems. The filter throughout is humanization-specific: sources that make a normative claim about making AI output or behavior read as human, not generic AI ethics.

## Angle Files

- [A-academic.md](A-academic.md) — ~34 peer-reviewed sources (FAccT, AIES, CHI, ACL/EMNLP, Nature, *Ethics and Information Technology*, *Philosophy & Technology*, *AI & Society*, IUI) organized into foundational taxonomy, anthropomorphism harms, sycophancy/epistemic harms, dark-pattern benchmarks, companion/grief-tech ethics, and manipulation/regulation. Updated April 2026: adds ELEPHANT (ICLR 2026), SycEval (AIES 2025), SusBench (IUI 2026), Siren Song of LLMs, Hidden Puppet Master (PUPPET dataset), and California SB 243.
- [B-industry.md](B-industry.md) — 29 posts and essays from Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, AI Now, DAIR, Stanford HAI, and critical press (MIT Tech Review, WIRED, Ars Technica, The Verge, Tech Policy Press), tracking the 2024–2026 arc of lab position-taking and the critics who pushed back. Updated April 2026: adds the Anthropic–OpenAI joint safety evaluation (Aug 2025), Petri audit tool (Oct 2025), Anthropic's January 2026 Constitution update, and Anthropic's user-wellbeing stance.
- [C-opensource.md](C-opensource.md) — ~35 repositories across eight clusters: sycophancy evals, bias benchmarks, honesty/deception evals, multi-metric harnesses (HELM, lm-evaluation-harness, Inspect), toxicity datasets, model-card/transparency tooling, fairness toolkits, and interpretability. Updated April 2026: adds Petri, ELEPHANT, SycEval, SusBench.
- [D-commercial.md](D-commercial.md) — 18 vendors and product categories in the five-layer responsible-AI stack (governance → runtime guardrails → observability → disclosure/watermarking → audit), including acquisition history and EU AI Act Art. 50 feature convergence up to April 2026. Updated April 2026: EU draft Code of Practice (Dec 2025), expanded companion-AI litigation, SynthID Detector portal (May 2025), Meta Video Seal, California SB 243, updated AI-detection accuracy data.
- [E-practical.md](E-practical.md) — 19 forum threads and community discussions from HN, LessWrong, Reddit, and AI-ethics Substacks, plus coverage of the GPT-4o sycophancy rollback, Replika ERP removal, Character.AI teen-suicide settlement and product-liability ruling (May 2025), FTC action against Replika, and California SB 243 — the live-stakes cases that ground abstract claims in real harm.

## Synthesis

- [SYNTHESIS.md](SYNTHESIS.md) — the distilled synthesis across all five angles: executive summary, cross-angle themes, top sources, key techniques, controversies, emerging trends, open questions, and a recommended reading order.

## Legacy

This file previously served as the full category summary. It has been superseded by [SYNTHESIS.md](SYNTHESIS.md), which provides a verified, cross-referenced synthesis built directly from the angle files. This file is preserved for traceability.
