**** The “AI Crisis”: Who Is Responsible? ****

https://lauren.vortex.com/2023/04/09/the-ai-crisis-who-is-responsible

There is a sense of gathering crisis revolving around Artificial Intelligence today -- not just AI itself but also the public's and governments' reactions to AI -- particularly generative AI.

Personally, I find little blame (not zero, but relatively little) with the software engineers and associated persons who are actually theorizing, building, and training these systems.

I find much more blame -- and the related central problem of the moment -- in some non-engineers (e.g., some executives at key levels of firms) who appear to be pushing AI projects into public view and use prematurely, out of fear of losing a seemingly suddenly highly competitive race, in some cases apparently deemphasizing crucial ethical and real world impact considerations.

While this view is understandable in terms of human nature, that does not justify such actions, and I fear that governments' reactions are heading toward a perfect storm of legislation and regulations that may be even more problematic than the premature release of these AI systems has been for these firms and the public. This may potentially set back for years critical work in AI that has the potential to bring great benefits (and yes, risks as well -- these both come together with any new technology) to the world.

By and large the Big Tech firms working on AI are doing a negligent and ultimately self-destructive job at communicating the importance -- and limitations! -- of these systems to the public, leaving a vacuum to be filled with misinformation and disinformation to gladden the hearts of political opportunists (both on the Right and the Left) around the planet.

If this doesn't start changing for the better immediately, today's controversies about AI are likely to look like firecrackers compared with nuclear bombs in the future. 

--Lauren--

@lauren I do have problems with the engineers. Very few of them have any ethics training to properly understand or push back on any problematic requirements. I have posted before about a large project that I worked on in the same vertical as ChatGPT that we eventually shut down because we were just stealing data to train our models with. Indiscriminate web scraping, doc collection, video transcription, images, etc.

@bflipp I would put the failure to provide ethics training in the wheelhouse of those same executives. I have written earlier about the need to provide control over the gathering of training data -- that control needs to be in the hands of websites, for example.

But ultimately, the rules about training, ethics, when products are released to the public, etc. are in the hands of those executives -- and those engineers are their responsibility.

@lauren I completely disagree. Absolving engineers of ethical responsibility is the “just following orders” excuse of building intelligent systems. Everyone in the chain has responsibility. I am not absolving the execs either.

@bflipp I am not absolving anyone of anything. But like I said, it appears that when engineers complain, the execs brush them aside. Short of quitting -- and being replaced with more "compliant" workers -- eventually they tire of the fight.