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Elon Musk and several other technologists call for a pause on training of AI systems.

“By focusing on hypothetical and long-term risks, it distracts from the regulation and enforcement we need in the here and now,” Myers West said.

Google’s Bard AI chatbot has now been released to the public

“We should be concerned that the current hype around generative AI is prompting these companies to push their products into development really rapidly,” says Sarah Myers West at the AI Now Institute, a research centre in New York. “Now the companies are experimenting in the wild with them, versus really taking the time to mitigate potential risks prior to deployment.”

The Battle For AI Supremacy Got Super Intense This Week, Risks Be Damned

“There’s so much hysteria and hype around these faster and faster rollouts right now,” said Amba Kak, executive director of New York University’s AI Now Institute and a former senior adviser on AI to the Federal Trade Commission, “that I think we’re in danger of walking back a lot of the progress that has been made around responsible release practices and the need for regulatory oversight of these technologies.”

GPT-4: OpenAI says its AI has ‘human-level performance’ on tests

“If anything, OpenAI has provided even less detail with which to evaluate its new system,” says Sarah Myers West at the AI Now Institute, a research centre in New York City. “But what we’ve seen so far in the roll-out of generative AI is that these systems are prone to error […] so we should be wary of any claims that these issues are resolved.”

It’s way too late to stop TikTok

“These firms are optimizing for things that allow them to make money,” says West, “which is attention, your willingness to click on an advertisement, and your willingness to make a purchase.”

As A.I. Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology

“The picture in Congress is bleak,” said Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, a nonprofit research center, who recently advised the F.T.C. “The stakes are high because these tools are used in very sensitive social domains like in hiring, housing and credit, and there is real evidence that over the years, A.I. tools have been flawed and biased.”

Sam Altman says ‘potentially scary’ AI is on the horizon. This is what keeps AI experts up at night

Sarah Myers West, Managing Director of the AI Now Institute, told Euronews Next that "in many senses, that’s already where we are," with AI systems already being used to exacerbate "longstanding patterns of inequality".

The Mimic: How will ChatGPT change everyday life? Sarah Myers West on artificial intelligence and human resilience.

West expects this latest version to affect certain industries significantly—but, she says, as uncanny as ChatGPT’s emulation of human writing is, it’s still capable of only a very small subset of functions previously requiring human intelligence. This isn’t to say it represents no meaningful problems, but to West, its future—and the future of artificial intelligence altogether—will be shaped less by the technology itself and more by what humanity does to determine its use.

How AI chatbots are changing how we write and who we trust

What ChatGPT is, and how it works. Will it change how much you can trust what you read, or hear?

Mental health service criticised for experiment with AI chatbot

The experiment “raises significant ethical and moral concerns”, says Sarah Myers West at the AI Now Institute, a research center in New York City."

New AI technology ChatGPT raising questions about human creativity

"It in no way is reflecting the depths of human understanding or human intelligence. What it's really good at doing is mimicking its form."

FTC Chair Khan Brings on AI Policy Advice From NYU Researchers

"Khan announced Friday that NYU’s Meredith Whittaker, Amba Kak, and Sarah Myers West are joining an AI strategy group within the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning.

AI Now Team Members on Government Detail

Prison Tech Comes Home

Whatever the marketing promises, ultimately landlords’, bosses’, and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic spaces. In doing so, it also reveals the mutability of surveillance and assessment technologies, and the way the same systems can play many roles, while ultimately serving the powerful.

Everyone should decide how their digital data are used — not just tech companies

Smartphones, sensors and consumer habits reveal much about society. Too few people have a say in how these data are created and used.

Launching ‘A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI Discourse’

The False Comfort of Human Oversight as an Antidote to A.I. Harm

Often expressed as the “human-in-the-loop” solution, this approach of human oversight over A.I. is rapidly becoming a staple in A.I. policy proposals globally. And although placing humans back in the “loop” of A.I. seems reassuring, this approach is instead “loopy” in a different sense: It rests on circular logic that offers false comfort and distracts from inherently harmful uses of automated systems.

Tech Companies are Training AI to Read Your Lips

“This is about actively creating a technology that can be put to harmful uses rather than identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in existing technology,” Sarah Myers West, a researcher for the AI Now Institute, told Motherboard.