Friday, April 26, 2024

Op-Ed: AI’s Most Pressing Ethics Problem; Columbia Journalism Review, April 23, 2024

 ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI, Columbia Journalism Review; Op-Ed: AI’s Most Pressing Ethics Problem

"I believe that, now more than ever, it’s time for people to organize and demand that AI companies pause their advance toward deploying more powerful systems and work to fix the technology’s current failures. While it may seem like a far-fetched idea, in February, Google decided to suspend its AI chatbot after it was enveloped in a public scandal. And just last month, in the wake of reporting about a rise in scams using the cloned voices of loved ones to solicit ransom, OpenAI announced it would not be releasing its new AI voice generator, citing its “potential for synthetic voice misuse.”

But I believe that society can’t just rely on the promises of American tech companies that have a history of putting profits and power above people. That’s why I argue that Congress needs to create an agency to regulate the industry. In the realm of AI, this agency should address potential harms by prohibiting the use of synthetic data and by requiring companies to audit and clean the original training data being used by their systems.

AI is now an omnipresent part of our lives. If we pause to fix the mistakes of the past and create new ethical guidelines and guardrails, it doesn’t have to become an existential threat to our future."

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