William D’Alessandro

William D’Alessandro

Research Affiliate

William (Bill) D'Alessandro is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie / UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Before starting at Oxford, he was a Philosophy Fellow in residence at the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He holds a PhD in philosophy and MS in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bill is interested in the transformative impact of AI in a variety of domains: its potential and limitations, how its use might make things go badly, and how we might make it go well. At CAIS, Bill coauthored papers on the role of generative AI in psychology research and on LLMs and biorisk. His work in progress includes papers on the prospects for aligning AI with deontological morality and on the importance of control of humanity's future. He's coauthoring two survey papers for Philosophy Compass on AI risk and AI safety.

Apart from his AI projects, Bill works in philosophy of science and mathematics, where he's interested in topics like explanation, understanding, models and proof.  He's also written about lookism in partner choice and the problem of truth in fiction.