OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies earlier than a Senate Judiciary Privacy, Technology, and the Law Subcommittee listening to titled ‘Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence’ on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 16, 2023. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
At most tech CEO hearings in recent times, lawmakers have taken a contentious tone, grilling executives over their data-privacy practices, aggressive strategies and extra.
But at Tuesday’s listening to on AI oversight together with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, lawmakers appeared notably extra welcoming towards the ChatGPT maker. One senator even went so far as asking whether or not Altman could be certified to manage guidelines regulating the business.
Altman’s heat welcome on Capitol Hill, which included a dinner dialogue the evening prior with dozens of House lawmakers and a separate talking occasion Tuesday afternoon attended by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has raised concern from some AI consultants who weren’t in attendance this week.
These consultants warning that lawmakers’ determination to be taught concerning the expertise from a number one business govt might unduly sway the options they search to manage AI. In conversations with CNBC within the days after Altman’s testimony, AI leaders urged Congress to interact with a various set of voices within the discipline to make sure a variety of issues are addressed, slightly than deal with those who serve company pursuits.
OpenAI didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon this story.
A pleasant tone
For some consultants, the tone of the listening to and Altman’s different engagements on the Hill raised alarm.
Lawmakers’ reward for Altman at occasions sounded nearly like “celebrity worship,” in accordance with Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University.
“You don’t ask the hard questions to people you’re engaged in a fandom about,” she mentioned.
“It doesn’t sound like the kind of hearing that’s oriented around accountability,” mentioned Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute. “Saying, ‘Oh, you should be in charge of a new regulatory agency’ is not an accountability posture.”
West mentioned the “laudatory” tone of some representatives following the dinner with Altman was stunning. She acknowledged it is probably a “signal that they’re just trying to sort of wrap their heads around what this new market even is, although it’s not new. It’s been around for a long time.”
Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor on the University of California, Los Angeles and creator of “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” mentioned lawmakers who attended the dinner with Altman appeared “deeply influenced to appreciate his product and what his company is doing. And that also doesn’t seem like a fair deliberation over the facts of what these technologies are.”
“Honestly, it’s disheartening to see Congress let these CEOs pave the way for carte blanche, whatever they want, the terms that are most favorable to them,” Noble mentioned.
Real variations from the social media period?
At Tuesday’s Senate listening to, lawmakers made comparisons to the social media period, noting their shock that business executives confirmed up asking for regulation. But consultants who spoke with CNBC mentioned business requires regulation are nothing new and infrequently serve an business’s personal pursuits.
“It’s really important to pay attention to specifics here and not let the supposed novelty of someone in tech saying the word ‘regulation’ without scoffing distract us from the very real stakes and what’s actually being proposed, the substance of those regulations,” mentioned Whittaker.
“Facebook has been using that strategy for years,” Meredith Broussard, NYU professor and creator of “More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech,” mentioned of the decision for regulation. “Really, what they do is they say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re definitely ready to be regulated’… And then they lobby [for] exactly the opposite. They take advantage of the confusion.”
Experts cautioned that the sorts of regulation Altman instructed, like an company to supervise AI, might really stall regulation and entrench incumbents.
“That seems like a great way to completely slow down any progress on regulation,” mentioned Margaret Mitchell, researcher and chief ethics scientist at AI firm Hugging Face. “Government is already not resourced enough to well support the agencies and entities they already have.”
Ravit Dotan, who leads an AI ethics lab on the University of Pittsburgh in addition to AI ethics at generative AI startup Bria.ai, mentioned that whereas it is sensible for lawmakers to take Big Tech corporations’ opinions under consideration since they’re key stakeholders, they should not dominate the dialog.
“One of the concerns that is coming from smaller companies generally is whether regulation would be something that is so cumbersome that only the big companies are really able to deal with [it], and then smaller companies end up having a lot of burdens,” Dotan mentioned.
Several researchers mentioned the federal government ought to deal with imposing the legal guidelines already on the books and applauded a recent joint agency statement that asserted the U.S. already has the power to enforce against discriminatory outcomes from the use of AI.
Dotan said there were bright spots in the hearing when she felt lawmakers were “informed” in their questions. But in other cases, Dotan said she wished lawmakers had pressed Altman for deeper explanations or commitments.
For example, when asked about the likelihood that AI will displace jobs, Altman said that eventually it will create more quality jobs. While Dotan said she agreed with that assessment, she wished lawmakers had asked Altman for more potential solutions to help displaced workers find a living or gain skills training in the meantime, before new job opportunities become more widely available.
“There are so many things that a company with the power of OpenAI backed by Microsoft has when it comes to displacement,” Dotan said. “So to me, to leave it as, ‘Your market is going to sort itself out eventually,’ was very disappointing.”
Diversity of voices
A key message AI experts have for lawmakers and government officials is to include a wider array of voices, both in personal background and field of experience.
“I think that community organizations and researchers should be at the table; people who have been studying the harmful effects of a variety of different kinds of technologies should be at the table,” said Noble. “We should have policies and resources available for people who’ve been damaged and harmed by these technologies … There are a lot of great ideas for repair that come from people who’ve been harmed. And we really have yet to see meaningful engagement in those ways.”
Mitchell said she hopes Congress engages more specifically with people involved in auditing AI tools and experts in surveillance capitalism and human-computer interactions, among others. West suggested that people with expertise in fields that will be affected by AI should also be included, like labor and climate experts.
Whittaker pointed out that there may already be “more hopeful seeds of meaningful regulation outside of the federal government,” pointing to the Writers’ Guild of America strike as an example, in which demands include job protections from AI.
Government should also pay greater attention and offer more resources to researchers in fields like social sciences, who have played a large role in uncovering the ways technology can result in discrimination and bias, according to Noble.
“Many of the challenges around the impact of AI in society has come from humanists and social scientists,” she said. “And yet we see that the funding that is predicated upon our findings, quite frankly, is now being distributed back to computer science departments that work alongside industry.”
Noble said she was “stunned” to see that the White House’s announcement of funding for seven new AI research centers seemed to have an emphasis on computer science.
“Most of the women that I know who have been the leading voices around the harms of AI for the last 20 years are not invited to the White House, are not funded by NSF [and] are not included in any kind of transformative support,” Noble said. “And yet our work does have and has had tremendous impact on shifting the conversations about the impact of these technologies on society.”
Noble pointed to the White House meeting earlier this month that included Altman and other tech CEOs, such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Noble said the photo of that assembly “really told the story of who has put themselves in charge…The same people who’ve been the makers of the problems are now somehow in charge of the solutions.”
Bringing in unbiased researchers to interact with authorities would give these consultants alternatives to make “important counterpoints” to company testimony, Noble mentioned.
Still, different consultants famous that they and their friends have engaged with authorities about AI, albeit with out the identical media consideration Altman’s listening to acquired and maybe with out a big occasion just like the dinner Altman attended with a large turnout of lawmakers.
Mitchell worries lawmakers are actually “primed” from their discussions with business leaders.
“They made the decision to to start these discussions, to ground these discussions in corporate interests,” Mitchell mentioned. “They could have gone in a totally opposite direction and asked them last.”
Mitchell mentioned she appreciated Altman’s feedback on Section 230, the regulation that helps defend on-line platforms from being held answerable for their customers’ speech. Altman conceded that outputs of generative AI instruments wouldn’t essentially be coated by the authorized legal responsibility defend and a distinct framework is required to evaluate legal responsibility for AI merchandise.
“I think, ultimately, the U.S. government will go in a direction that favors large tech corporations,” Mitchell mentioned. “My hope is that other people, or people like me, can at least minimize the damage, or show some of the devil in the details to lead away from some of the more problematic ideas.”
“There’s a whole chorus of people who have been warning about the problems, including bias along the lines of race and gender and disability, inside AI systems,” mentioned Broussard. “And if the critical voices get elevated as much as the commercial voices, then I think we’re going to have a more robust dialogue.”
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