- [Jon] AI ethics isn't about imaginary sci-fi scenarios
like killer robots.
It's about recognizing real present dangers
of generative AI.
Now, there's a lot of good stuff
that could come from generative AI,
from ways to diagnose cancers, to discover new drugs,
to find solutions for climate change,
but it's easy to forget
amidst all this potentially good news
about the many potential harms of this new technology.
The IMPACT RISK acronym offers a mnemonic
so you or your students
can help take these various harms into account.
My name is Jon Ippolito,
and I'm gonna go through these one at a time.
I is for Infowar.
AI-powered information
that threatens to undermine democracy,
that includes deep fakes of high profile figures
like President Biden here heard in a faked robocall
as part of the 2024 presidential primaries.
- [Joe] Voting this Tuesday
only enables the Republicans in...
- [Jon] It also includes personalized attacks
on local figures like this faked audio
from a high school principal in Maryland.
- [Principal] "You know, I seriously don't understand
why I have to constantly put up
with these dumbasses here every day."
- [Jon] The ease of generating customized code
and text has also made cyber attacks cheaper
and faster to deploy.
Whether that means writing custom malware
or writing spearfishing emails.
M is for Monopoly.
This one flies under the radar of a lot of people's mind
when they think about AI harms.
But a handful of Silicon Valley titans
occupy the generative AI market
with Google vying for dominance
against the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership,
Meta prevailing when it comes to open-source models.
This concentration of power is even more evident
in the AI chip market where Nvidia's dominance
leaves competitors scrambling for crumbs.
The massive amount of computation required
to compete in this market has led to brittle monopolies
that can stifle entrepreneurship and innovation.
P is for Plagiarism and Privacy.
Artists, musicians, and authors are suing AI companies
for training their models on copyrighted works,
sometimes churning out knockoffs
that resemble their own work.
On the privacy front,
facial recognition software
can trawl the internet for your face,
and teens in middle school can create deepfake nudes
of their classmates,
turning privacy into a relic of the past.
A is for Automated Labor.
While few jobs may be completely replaced by robots,
companies looking to cut costs can maintain productivity
by relying on senior employees armed with AI.
That means fewer openings
for junior lawyers and copywriters,
and fewer freelance opportunities
for designers and composers.
Meanwhile, high stakes decisions,
whether on Wall Street or on the battlefield,
are being outsourced to algorithms.
Without sufficient human oversight,
sudden shifts in job markets
due to automation could destabilize economies
faster than they can adapt.
C is for Climate Impact.
By 2027, the AI sector could eat as much energy per year
as the Netherlands.
Protestors from Oregon to Uruguay are targeting data centers
that suck up drinking water from local reservoirs.
Fevers to win the race to roll out
ever bigger generative AI models,
Microsoft and Google have fallen well behind
in their carbon reduction goals,
accelerating the threat of climate change.
T is for Tainted Data.
The ghosts of human bias haunt our AI systems.
Resume screeners discriminate against women
and non-white applicants.
Facial recognition systems struggle with darker skin tones,
potentially resulting in a self-driving car
failing to identify a Black pedestrian.
Even tools meant to identify AI-generated essays
can incorrectly flag non-natives English speakers.
These aren't just glitches.
They're mirrors reflecting society's inequities.
Now let's do RISK.
Starting with R, Reality Distortion.
AI's outputs are often disconnected from reality
with potentially dangerous consequences.
Bing's Sydney Chatbot told a New York Times reporter
to leave his wife for her,
while ChatGPT accused a law professor of sexual harassment.
Unscrupulous users can now generate
low quality news articles several per minute
that could be hard to distinguish from human-written posts.
These confident sounding fabrications
or hallucinations as they're sometimes misleadingly called
don't have to be deliberate disinformation to cause harm,
that makes them different from infowar.
Persistent exposure to AI-generated distortions
may erode trust inauthentic sources
of information over time,
or simply bury them in a mountain of digital debris.
I for Injustice.
While Silicon Valley reaps the rewards of AI,
the human cost is often hidden.
Kenyans making a dollar an hour suffering emotional trauma
while flagging detailed descriptions of murder, rape,
and child sex abuse generated by chatbots.
Meanwhile, in the Congo,
children as young as seven are mining cobalt
for our AI-powered devices.
In government, powerful AI companies
might influence regulations in their favor,
perpetuating inequality in the market.
In education, the subscription costs
of better large language models
raise concerns about a new digital divide.
S is for Stereotyping.
Generative AI often devolves to cliches
when answering questions.
Ask an image generator for a doctor,
you're likely to get a middle aged white guy in a lab coat.
Request an African village,
and it might depict mud huts and sunsets.
These outputs aren't simply the result
of tainted data described earlier.
They operate at a deeper level,
reflecting the probabilistic nature
of large language models,
which return the average result from a prompt.
Nevertheless, by surfacing stereotypes rather than outliers,
AI might favor dominant cultures and languages,
leading to the erosion of cultural diversity.
Finally, K is for Knockoff Experiences.
In classrooms across the world,
teachers grapple with AI-generated homework
as students outsource their learning to chatbots.
In the music world, services like Suno
allow everyone to create songs
without touching an instrument,
potentially flooding streaming platforms
with AI-generated tunes.
These shortcuts threaten to replace
genuine skill development and creative expression
with shallow imitations that undermine personal growth.
Beyond the individual, human relationships may devolve
as AI generates thank you notes
and adults turn to AI partners for companionship
instead of their flesh and blood peers.
By keeping the IMPACT RISK framework in mind,
we can navigate the AI revolution more thoughtfully,
examining whether AI can be a force for progress
rather than just a Pandora's box of unintended consequences.