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Can AI Be Used Responsibly? The Ethics of Care in a Machine Age

Almost every conversation about AI is about power — what it can do, what jobs it will replace, and who it will enrich. Almost no one is asking what it would mean to bring care to this technology. In this solo episode of Care More Be Better, host Corinna Bellizzi, PhD, MBA draws on Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, her own doctoral research into regenerative enterprise, and her personal experience using Claude and ChatGPT in dissertation research to make the case that AI can be an amplifier of care — but only with intention, transparency, and accountability. She covers the copyright settlement Anthropic reached with authors in July 2026, the attention question, the RFK Jr. MAHA report hallucinations, and the four questions everyone should ask before adopting any AI tool.

Chapter Markers

  • 00:00 — Opening Question: What Does It Mean to Care When Machines Mediate How We Learn?
  • 01:00 — Introduction: A Solo Episode on AI Ethics
  • 02:00 — AI Is Already in Your Life Whether You Chose It or Not
  • 03:00 — What Ethics of Care Actually Is — Gilligan, Noddings, and the Care Tradition
  • 05:00 — Ethics of Care and Regeneration as Near-Synonyms
  • 05:30 — The Care Questions AI Raises: Copyright, Ecology, Labor, Attention
  • 06:00 — The Copyright Reckoning: Anthropic’s $1.5B Settlement and 35+ Active Cases
  • 06:30 — The Ecological Footprint: Water, Energy, and Whose Community Hosts the Data Center
  • 07:00 — The Labor Question: Whose Words Trained the Model?
  • 07:30 — The Attention Question: What Happens to Wonder When Answers Arrive Instantly?
  • 08:00 — The Whale Bends Story — and What Was Lost
  • 10:00 — Using AI in Doctoral Research: Building Intelligent Queries
  • 12:00 — Claude vs. ChatGPT: The Hallucination Problem
  • 13:30 — The RFK Jr. MAHA Report: What Happens When Nobody Checks
  • 14:00 — Using Claude for the RSD15 Paper: Editing Without Outsourcing the Thinking
  • 16:00 — AI in Podcast Production and the Disclosure Question
  • 17:30 — The Website Disclaimer: What It Says and Why
  • 18:30 — AI as Amplifier of Care — Used With Intention
  • 19:00 — Four Questions to Ask Before Adopting Any AI Tool
  • 20:00 — The Freedom Not to Use AI: Your Integrity Is Yours
  • 20:30 — Closing: Embracing Technology with Intention, Purpose, and Integrity

“Ethics of care moves us from thinking in rules and regulations, in inputs and outputs, to who is affected and what do they need. This show’s name is essentially a care ethics thesis. Care more, be better. The order matters. You have to care first.”

— Corinna Bellizzi, PhD | Care More Be Better | Episode #301

Can AI Be Used Responsibly? The Ethics of Care in a Machine Age

This episode addresses a single question: What does it mean to care more when machines mediate how we learn, who we learn from and with, and what ideas we decide to platform? A solo episode featuring Corinna Bellizzi, PhD, MBA in which she discusses the intersections of AI use that she affects as well as relevant news.

What does it mean to care when machines mediate how we learn, who we learn from and with, and what ideas we decide to platform? Today, nearly every conversation about artificial intelligence or AI is about power, what it can do, what tasks and jobs it will replace, and who it will enrich. Almost no one is asking what it would mean to bring care to this technology.

How can we ensure our use of it remains ethical? Is there such a thing as responsible use when the very way it was created involved the use of someone else’s copyrighted and personal material?

Welcome & Episode Framing

Welcome, Regenerators. Today, I don’t have a guest. It’s just me sharing my thoughts with some facts and figures as I ask a deeper question: Can the use of AI forefront ethics of care? And if so, can it be used responsibly? I’ll share how I’ve used AI and why this conversation is one we need to have nearly every day with self-reflective transparency And I’m also confronting this conversation head-on as both a beneficiary of AI and a critic of it.

So before we dive in, let’s be honest about how most of us use AI every single day. In this moment, it’s nearly impossible to avoid AI, even if you want to. We use it with every Google search. We use it every time we scroll through social media. If we use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Twitter, we are part of the value stream that emboldens AI every day.

AI is used to scrape our content, to improve visual renderings, to assess speech, and build a more natural cadence in large language models. Even social media algorithms are optimized to feed us more addictive content in our feeds. What you create isn’t really yours anymore. If it’s online, it is the feeding ground for AI.

So let’s even get more specific. If you use Microsoft, Copilot is there in the rafters suggesting changes to your text to optimize clarity, and sometimes taking these suggestions can also change your meaning. If you use Google products, including Gmail, Gemini is there waiting. If you use Grammarly, it’s the same story.

Integrate the plugin on your desktop and in your browser. What happens next? Some of this tool usage may not seem like AI to you, but [00:03:00] it is. Each of these technologies uses AI with every keystroke and with every line of recommended text, for the start of an email, for the start of a document or a letter.

And if you are using a large language model more directly, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, then you should at least understand that you are not just using this new technology, you are intentionally feeding the machine.

What Does Ethics of Care Actually Mean?

So what does ethics of care actually mean? This concept came to the stage in the nineteen eighties through the work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, nineteen eighty-two, and Nel Noddings, Caring, nineteen eighty-four.

It is a moral philosophy rooted in relationship attentiveness and responsiveness to the needs of others. Others can mean more than other people. It can mean any living being. This means that ethics of care are at the center of regenerative thinking too, when we consider the needs that go beyond our own, when we think about entire ecosystems and the effects of humans on those systems.

Photo by Philippe Oursel on Unsplash

We come from ethics of care in those situations. This is what it means to put life at the center of every action we take and every decision we make. That’s exactly how Paul Hawken defines regeneration in his book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. In this perspective then, ethics of care and regeneration could be synonyms for one another.You can’t have regeneration without ethics of care. Care ethics then moves us from thinking in rules and regulations into inputs and outputs to who is affected and what do they need. This show’s name is essentially a care ethics thesis. Care more, be better. The order matters. You have to care first, because before you can create something better, you have to understand it, and you have to care about it.

This concept is also at the core of my PhD research, which evaluated purpose-led regenerative organizations. I sought to define what made them similar and also how they differed. In the end, my research, which was built upon Virginia Held’s work, which in the early 2000s argued that care ethics provides an alternative to dominant business logics that treat people as isolated actors.

Held, she insisted instead that we are relational beings, and our organizations need to reflect that. Ethics of care, it’s relational. It is sensitive to context. It engages our emotions and helps us understand that those that are more affected or more vulnerable deserve disproportionate moral consideration.

The Care Questions AI Raises

The care questions that AI raises, while many have accused AI companies of theft, courts have mostly ruled that training AI can be fair use if, if the material is used and acquired lawfully.

Recently, though, Anthropic agreed to pay one point five billion dollars to authors and publishers. That’s roughly three thousand dollars per work across half a million books. This was after a court ruled that the work they required from pirated sites violated copyright, even though the training itself was considered fair use.

A federal judge granted final approval to that settlement in July this year, making it the largest copyright settlement on record. As of mid twenty-twenty six, more than thirty-five training data cases remain active in the Western United States jurisdictions. This includes New York Times versus OpenAI.

After copyright issues, we are also forced to contend with the ecological footprint of AI. That’s energy and water, which are usually framed as carbon accounting. But when we look at this from an ethics of care perspective, we have to ask other questions like, whose watershed does this affect? Whose grid?

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Whose community hosts the data center, and who gets to decide of its use? We have the technology to produce data centers that have embedded circularity, that are closed loop, and therefore don’t have a huge water footprint. Yet many, even most of the planned data centers aren’t built that way. They use an incredible amount of water and an incredible amount of energy.

Then there’s a laborers questions– the labor question, rather. Whose words, whose art, and whose expertise trained these systems? Whose voices are amplified and whose are flattened and outright omitted? Data workers and content moderators can and will be the invisible arbiters of AI.

How are their views and opinions putting a thumb on the scale of what our future is building? And what of the attention question? What happens to our capacity for attentiveness, which is the root skill of care, when answers arrive instantly? We’ve all been there. I can remember having a discussion with my husband about scuba diving.

We wondered whether whales, who breathe air on the surface, then dive really deep, ever suffer from the bends. We thought about the question for a while, debated over a beer, and assuming that they must get some negative effects from absorbing too many bubbles into their soft tissues when they dive deep, we really postulated what could it cause? What could they really be going through?

The reality might actually be minimized because they aren’t also breathing while they’re underwater for extended periods, but they must have some effect. Well, Google was only a few taps on our phones away. Eventually, we searched it and found that whales have two methods of dealing with the bends. First, their lungs collapse, protecting them while they deep dive.

Second, they have specialized tissue in and around their lungs that helps them deal with the inevitability of getting the bends. While they have the same physics at play in their bodies, they’ve essentially adapted over millions of years to mitigate the negative effects of being an aquatic surface-breathing creature.

A few more clicks and we learned that stranded beaked whales can suffer bends-like injuries when naval sonar panics them into breaking their natural dive rhythm. It was unnerving, though not surprising, to see this example of how human action can disrupt the natural order of sea life.

We revisited that conversation over the years and realized that the creative thinking and the sense of wonder that we were able to engage with that preceded that Google search was what made it a fun, memorable conversation. So if every wonder, every question is answered in a few clicks right away, what happens to our critical thinking?

What happens to our sense of wonder, even of joy? But that is not to say that this tool doesn’t also bring with it support for critical thinking if you use it that way. But using AI with intentionality is really what it takes to ensure that that path stays open for us I’d like to talk about my dissertation and how I’ve used it.

Tool or Relationship? The Dissertation Bridge

I’ve been in graduate school off and on since twenty-nineteen. Now, I completed my undergraduate requirements back in nineteen ninety-eight, well before this technology existed. At the time, it was a luxury to have my own computer on which I could complete most of my classwork.

I still used school computers for some of it, including email, since dial-up modems could be, let’s just say, unreliable. So I have seen how much research has changed in that time. When I advocate for the use of AI in research, it is precisely because I have had to wade through physical card stacks and through poorly cataloged computer systems to try and find relevant research for thesis projects and papers, and research throughout my college career.

By the time I started my doctoral research in the mid-twenty twenties, AI had made my life so much easier. I could build an intelligent query and state something along the lines of, “Please help me find five peer-reviewed articles on topic X that was published in the last five years. With each study, please provide me with a direct link to the article and a brief summary in layman’s terms,” so I didn’t have to tease through the jargon.

Within a minute or two, I’d see five relevant studies. They would be in hand. I may choose to eliminate two of them based purely on the summaries, then go dive into the three that remained and read those articles. This step alone saved me hours upon hours of fruitless research searches. If there weren’t five studies on the topic that I needed to research, ChatGPT or Claude, I’ve used both, would let me know.

It would ask me whether it could look further into history, maybe the next five-year stint. I’d give it permission to look that far in reverse, and there it would go. It’d come up with five more, maybe two more. Sometimes there was so much available research that it would be hard to tease through everything.

So in those cases, I’d review some of the articles and then ask the AI to provide me with sources that refuted this line of thinking or that. The AI would become my partner in sleuthing out opposing views. With time, it would anticipate this and provide opposing plans earlier in the research And ultimately, over the course of my use of AI, I stopped using ChatGPT as a research aid.

Too often, it would provide me with articles and links that I– that simply didn’t exist. It hallucinated articles on topics that were never written or misattributed theories to a different researcher. At the time I was doing this research, roughly one in ten citations would be a complete fabrication.

That simply wasn’t happening with Claude, so I shifted my focus to work with Claude instead. Even so, each and every time I used AI as a research tool, I always checked its work. If I had not, if I had become overly reliant on ChatGPT or Claude or any other AI for that matter, I would have propagated falsehoods or been more likely to. I might have misattributed research to someone that didn’t deserve it. This can get researchers into trouble. In fact, you may recall a White House report on children’s health issued by the Make America Healthy Again Commission under Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. It included at least seven problematic citations to studies that didn’t exist.

By National Farm Worker Ministry – UFW’s ARturo Rodriguez & Robert Kennedy Jr., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58910721

The Washington Post found direct evidence of AI generation, including references that contained markers associated with OpenAI. The White House dismissed these issues, calling them formatting issues while updating the report in the background. My experience personally, and the above RFK-led MAHA case, shows us how AI can be an incredible research tool but also serves as a cautionary tale.

AI does not replace thinking. AI properly used is an effective collaborator. AI can amplify your knowledge when used with care, but it is not a substitute for cultivating your own knowledge and your own work. Having just completed my dissertation this summer, I used Claude to help me fine-tune an article that showcased key findings from that research.

I drafted a paper for Related Systems Thinking and Designs twenty twenty-six conference, RSD fifteen, and I had trouble getting the article down to a maximum five thousand words. It was frankly hard for me to see my own redundancies, in part because I come from the world of marketing, where you often tell people what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them what you want to tell them, and then you tell them what you told them.

When you’re allotted only five thousand words to summarize a dissertation that is well over two hundred pages in length, that can be incredibly challenging. For context, I’ve served as an editor. I’ve helped friends find artifacts of earlier drafts in their work, fiction and nonfiction. But it’s often harder to see redundancies and artifacts from earlier drafts in your own research, precisely because you’ve spent so much time with the work.

You have so much more context in your brain than is on the page. Did you remove a reference to a research study that should have been included? Did you make a claim that wasn’t adequately substantiated in the work? Did you overstate or restate something? Well, guess what? Claude is really good at that type of work and can make relevant suggestions.

Used like this, it can be an effective editing tool, helping you decide where to cut or where to refine your text. When I use Claude in this way, Claude isn’t doing the writing for me. It’s helping me identify what needs to be changed or modified. Then I make the changes that make sense and modify the text where it needs massaging.

The work is still mine, and it’s referenced in my RSD fifteen paper as a disclosure at the bottom of [00:16:00] the document. That’s frankly how it can be used ethically in research, in editing, and in writing. But some lean so heavily on their AI model of choice that it does the editing work for them. In cases like those, if the AI hallucinates, who catches it?

“AI does not replace thinking. AI properly used is an effective collaborator. AI can amplify your knowledge when used with care, but it is not a substitute for cultivating your own knowledge and your own work.”
— Corinna Bellizzi, PhD, MBA | Care More Be Better | Episode 301

Furthermore, whose work is it really? Is it attributed to Claude or to the originator? What is the right way to handle that question? We could debate this all day long, but what I’ll say is this. The entire time I’ve been in graduate study, I’ve also been in communications and in podcasting. I began using AI tools in my editing first through my production team.

They use technologies that are AI optimized, and I wasn’t ever explicitly told this, but I understood it to be true. I knew that these tools would help them generate transcripts from my recordings, which are then naturally cleaned to eliminate the ums and the ahs, verbal stumble– stumbles, look, I just did it there, and repeats.

I’m fairly certain the tool that scrubs these out is AI-enabled. I also use AI in research, looking for key articles and information that may relate to the guests that I’m bringing on my show. Then software that auto-clips my episodes for meaningful moments also uses technology that connects to AI. It’s not that that software says it does, I just assume it.

So the question of whether all of this really needs to be divulged is up for debate, too. But in the interest of transparency, I state its use on my site, caremorebebetter.com. It’s in the footer section, so it’s on every page. That disclaimer presently reads, quote, “Care More, Be Better uses AI tools in its production process, including research, transcript preparation, editing, and episode clip selection. Every piece of content is reviewed and approved by host Corinna Bellizzi. The words shared by our host and guests are not altered except to clean transcripts of ums, uhs, and stutters.”

So the question remains, if care is cultivated relationally, what happens when more of our learning and deciding routes through machines than through our own decision processes? Does AI extend our relational reach, or does it thin it? In my view, AI can be used as an amplifier of care, not merely a substitute for it.

Engaging AI With Intention – The Practical Takeaways

Used the way I’ve outlined in this episode, AI can help you prepare, research, and reach people, so the human moments we share get more attention, not less. Engaging in AI this way means that you’re coming forward with intention. You’re asking, “What does deliberate intentional engagement with AI really look like?”

First, choose when you are comfortable using AI and when you aren’t. If an AI-assisted Google search feels okay, then use that functionality, and don’t worry about it. If not, you could consider other tools like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, or Startpage, which either skip AI summaries or let you turn them off entirely.

Do you suspect that AI is being used behind the scenes in an area of your business that you can affect? Does it lurk in your social media or editing tools? Ask questions. Verify its use. Then you can choose to disclose it. Whatever your decision, make sure your work is represented truthfully and honestly.

For everyday listeners, I have three or four questions to ask as you consider adopting an AI tool. Who built this, and who benefits from it? What did it cost to make it? What am I outsourcing? And lastly, do I really want to use it? Maybe you don’t, and that’s perfectly okay. Maybe you do, and that’s okay too.

We live in complicated times. With knowledge comes power, and sticking your head in the sand as technology advances isn’t really an option in this smartphone-enabled times that we live in. You can choose not to use AI, even if that means limiting search functions or going dark on social media. Remember, sometimes living your values is easy, others not so much, but your integrity is yours.

You get to decide what you’re comfortable with. Approach that question mindfully and with an open heart. Now, as we prepare to wrap, I want to nod to Prescott College, my cause partner. Care is something we are taught. We first learn how to care when we’re engaging with our family and in community and through our lived experiences.

In Closing…

None of us arrives here alone. I’ve cultivated my ethics of care throughout my life, from my early days in activism, to my experience as a business person, to my education, which culminated in my PhD at Prescott College. They have been hard at work cultivating tomorrow’s leaders for the past 60 years, teaching people to pay attention to the living world, to understand the lived experience of others, and the more than human realm.

I consider them my cause partner and provide a monthly gift of at least $60 in honor of their 60th year. You can join me in this effort and support them too. Visit caremorebebetter.com/support for details. Thank you listeners now and always for being a part of this pod and this community, because together we really can do so much more.

We can care more, we can be better, we can even embrace the very technology that improves our lives with intention, purpose, mindfulness, and integrity. Thank you

Resources

References

Author

  • Corinna is a natural products industry executive who has earned a reputation for leading the development and growth of responsible brands (e.g. Nordic Naturals, iwi, NutriGold). In her professional life, she champions social benefit programs to enhance company impact while preserving and protecting our home planet. She’s presently working tirelessly on the development of a new pre-market that seeks to achieve a carbon-negative impact. In January 2021 she launched her show, Care More, Be Better: A Social Impact + Sustainability Podcast to amplify the efforts of inspired individuals and conscious companies. Through Care More Be Better, she shares their stories in an effort to show us all that one person with one idea can have a big impact. As part of her lifelong education journey, she earned her MBA from Santa Clara University, graduating at the top of her class with a triple focus in Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Marketing in June 2021.

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