Summary:
As Google races to catch up with OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT, employees are raising concerns about the company’s ethical commitments.
In the pursuit of integrating generative AI into its key products, Google is allegedly compromising on misinformation and other potential harms, according to 18 current and former workers, speaking to Bloomberg.
Google’s chatbot, Bard, was released despite receiving criticism internally for providing low-quality or even dangerous information. Currently, Bard beta is only available in the U.S. and not possible to use in Canada yet (unless you have a VPN and change your location to the United States).
Some employees argue that the accelerated development timeline has disempowered and demoralized the group working on AI ethics, which Google had pledged to reinforce.
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, states that “AI ethics has taken a back seat.” She believes that without prioritizing ethics over profit and growth, the ethical balance will not work. Despite Google’s insistence that responsible AI remains a top priority, employees argue that the pace of development is leaving insufficient time to study potential harms.
The pressure to compete with ChatGPT has led Google to launch a series of generative AI products and features, even as internal debates over the ethical implications continue. AI ethics reviews are mostly voluntary, and employees feel that speaking up against new generative AI products is futile.
Margaret Mitchell, a former Google employee, said, “There is a great amount of frustration, a great amount of this sense of like, what are we even doing?”
Elon Musk plans to create his own ChatGPT rival called ‘TruthGPT’ and become another player in the AI race.
