Letter from Musk and scientists about pause in AI generates debate – 03/30/2023 – Tech

The public letter signed by tycoon Elon Musk and hundreds of experts to stop the development of artificial intelligence (AI) provoked a debate among academics on the networks this Thursday (30).

The dizzying advances of AI prompted Musk, founder of electric car giant Tesla and current owner of Twitter, to sign this letter, in the face of what he calls the “dramatic economic and political disruption (especially for democracy) that AI will cause”.

Although the letter, published on the website futureoflife.org, was signed by independent thinkers such as historian Yuval Noah Harari, or Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, some academics protest against what they consider a misinterpretation of the discussion.

Timnit Gebru, a researcher specializing in the ethics of artificial intelligence, wrote a scholarly article that was quoted in the letter and expressed dissatisfaction with the use made of the text.

“They basically say the opposite of what we said and quoted in our article,” he criticizes.

The article’s other author, Emily Bender, describes the open letter as a “mess”.

“Over the last few months, we’ve seen AI labs launch into a headlong race to develop and deploy increasingly powerful digital brains that no one, not even their creators, can reliably understand, predict, or control,” Musk and the experts say.

The director of Open AI, which designed ChatGPT, Sam Altman, admitted that he is “a little afraid” that his algorithm will be used for “large-scale disinformation, or for cyber-attacks”.

Academics Gebru and Bender state, however, that the danger of AI is “the concentration of power in the hands of people, the reproduction of systems of oppression, the damage to the information ecosystem”.

One of the signatories of the open letter, Emad Mostaque, founder of the British company Stability AI, said he had withdrawn from the demand for a six-month moratorium.

“I don’t think a six-month hiatus is the best idea,” he said on Twitter.