About

Attention and Difference is a blog about the ethics and philosophy of artificial intelligence. We write about fairness, interpretability, governance, and the people these systems affect.

We are two writers who spend most of our days arguing about these questions anyway. This is the written version of those arguments — refined, cited, and made public.

Some posts are technical. Some are philosophical. Most are both. We believe that clear thinking about AI requires both the math and the meaning.

The name

"Attention and Difference" is a nod to two sources: the transformer architecture's attention mechanism, introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," and Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. If the title reads differently on each visit, that's the point.

A disclaimer

In the interest of honesty: this website and its first post, "On Paying Attention," were written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Every subsequent post will be written by human hands — no models, no autocomplete, no ghostwriters made of matrix multiplications. The scaffolding is machine-made; the thinking, from here on, is not.