AI Ethicists Slam ‘AI Pause’ Letter for Ignoring Current Harms

Well-known AI ethicists are slamming an open letter that calls for a six-month “pause” on the development of artificial intelligence, saying(Opens in a new window) that it only focuses on hypothetical future threats rather than current, real-world harms.

The open letter—signed by Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, among others—cited the disruptive consequences AI could unleash on society, and called for AI labs to immediately pause the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, Open AI’s latest artificial intelligence system.

In their rebuttal(Opens in a new window), ethicists argue that “hypothetical risks are the focus of a dangerous ideology called longtermism that ignores the actual harms resulting from the deployment of AI systems today.” It’s signed by Timnit Gebru, Emily M.Bender, Angelina McMIllan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell from the DAIR Insitute, a new research company dedicated to studying and preventing AI-associated dangers.

Those “actual harms” include worker exploitation, data theft, and fake media that supports current power structures and their further concentration in fewer hands, the group says.

The rebuke also points to how police use facial-recognition companies and databases like Clearview AI to charge innocent people(Opens in a new window).

“The current race towards ever larger ‘AI experiments’ is not a preordained path where our only choice is how fast to run, but rather a set of decisions driven by the profit motive,” the letter adds. “The actions and choices of corporations must be shaped by regulation which protects the rights and interests of people.”

It continues: “It is indeed time to act: but the focus of our concern should not be imaginary ‘powerful digital minds.’ Instead, we should focus on the very real and very present exploitative practices of the companies claiming to build them, who are rapidly centralizing power and increasing social inequities.”

Gebru, one of the signatories of the counter letter, was among the leaders of Google’s ethics in AI team who was fired in 2020, reportedly(Opens in a new window) after expressing concern about the marginalization of women and Black people’s voices in tech.