Abigail Thorn

Abigail Thorn (born 1993) is a British philosopher, writer, and actress who founded Philosophy Tube in 2013 to give away the philosophy degree she had just paid for, and grew it into a theatrically staged channel of well over a million subscribers. She came out as a trans woman in 2021, wrote and starred in the play The Prince, voiced Nocturne in Baldur’s Gate 3, and has acted in The Acolyte and House of the Dragon — making her a member of the acting unions whose AI fights she covers.

Dismantling “ethical AI”

Her October 2023 video “Here’s What Ethical AI Really Means,” released amid the SAG-AFTRA strike over AI protections, is a fifty-six-minute case against taking the tech industry’s ethics branding at face value. Working through case studies from Amazon’s biased hiring model to the outsourced data workers who label training sets, she argues that harms flow from how models are built and deployed — scraped data, exploited labor, environmental cost — and that “ethical AI” talk functions as marketing while the underlying business model goes unexamined. Her preferred reframing: talk about large-scale computing and who bears its costs.

The video’s most personal evidence was her own: Thorn recounted discovering non-consensual deepfake pornography generated from her publicly available videos — her face, mined from work she and her crew made, repurposed without consent. She had raised the issue publicly as early as February 2023, and it grounds her broader argument that consent is the missing foundation of the entire training-data economy.

Thorn’s critique is systemic rather than technophobic — a socialist analysis of who owns the machines, in the tradition of critics like Emily M. Bender on the academic side. But between the union card, the deepfake experience, and the video-essay prosecution of AI ethics claims, her position in the debate is unambiguous.