Giada Pistilli

Giada Pistilli is a philosopher and AI ethics researcher who has been studying the ethics of conversational AI since 2017, years before the technology became a mainstream concern. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Sorbonne Université, where her doctoral research examined how moral philosophy can inform the design and governance of conversational agents. She remains an Associate Researcher at the Sorbonne Université - CNRS lab Sciences, Normes, Démocraties.

Her published research spans AI ethics, value alignment, multilingual model evaluation, and human-AI companionship, with work presented at NeurIPS, FAccT, AAAI/ACM AIES, NAACL, and ICLR. Her insights on these topics have been featured in Nature, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other international outlets.

She spent nearly four years as Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, where she shaped ethical frameworks for one of the largest open-source AI platforms in the world and co-chaired the ethics working group of BigScience, the international research collaboration behind the multilingual language model BLOOM. She now works on model behavior and safety at a major European AI company, where she builds evaluation benchmarks for multilingual and culturally nuanced AI. Her broader research examines how AI systems encode values, shape social relations, and interact with people across cultures and languages. This book draws on one thread of that work: what happens when those interactions become relationships.

Her perspective is uncommon in this space: trained in moral philosophy, embedded in engineering teams, and working across the full cycle from research to deployment. Her first book is the product of that position.

She lives in Paris with her husband, daughter, and cat.