News

Congress scrambles to craft AI privacy rules as industry races ahead

Kak said there is a chance now for lawmakers and regulators to take action before AI systems are “already entrenched in a particular trajectory.”

How AI reduces the world to sterotypes

“Essentially what this is doing is flattening descriptions of, say, ‘an Indian person’ or ‘a Nigerian house’ into particular stereotypes which could be viewed in a negative light,” Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute, a U.S.-based policy research organization, told Rest of World. Even stereotypes that are not inherently negative, she said, are still stereotypes: They reflect a particular value judgment, and a winnowing of diversity.

AI and Industrial Policy: Challenging the Current Paradigm

Do We Need an FDA for AI?: A Rapid Expert Deliberation

How Big Tech is co-opting the rising stars of artificial intelligence

“To build AI at any kind of meaningful scale, any developer is going to have core dependencies on resources that are largely concentrated in only a few firms,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director at the AI Now Institute, which researches the effects of AI on society. “There really isn’t a path out of it.”

Trust-busters come for AI’s building blocks

“Right now, compute seems like a more concrete input to regulate,” said Vipra, who co-authored a “Computational Power and AI” report released last week by the AI Now Institute, a New York-based think tank focused on the technology’s social implications.

How Big Tech is co-opting the rising stars of artificial intelligence

“To build AI at any kind of meaningful scale, any developer is going to have core dependencies on resources that are largely concentrated in only a few firms,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director at the AI Now Institute, which researches the effects of AI on society. “There really isn’t a path out of it.”

Amazon’s Partnership With Anthropic Shows Size Matters in the AI Industry

Vipra says that Anthropic, which prides itself on being particularly safety-conscious, will struggle to avoid being influenced by Amazon. “The announcement says it's all about safety—it's pitched as expanding access to safe AI products," she says. "But it really shows that productization has taken over.”

Tech CEOs Met With Congress To Discuss The Future Of AI Regulation

Sarah Myers West and Brian Ray join AirTalk host Larry Mantle to talk about the future of AI policy.

Musk, Zuckerberg Lead Parade of Tech Titans to Senate AI Event

“There’s been quite a lot of skepticism around whose views are represented and whether the concerns of the public are adequately represented here,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy research group.

The Deceptive Fantasy Behind LLaMA-2 and Other Open-Source AI

Sarah Myers West explains why AI programs don't come close to truly being open.

AI-enhanced identification: A danger in the Middle East?

The AI Now Institute wants a complete ban on remote biometric identification, Kak added. "Nothing else makes sense," she told DW, adding that privacy laws and other rules won't help. "And not just in the Middle East, but here in the US and in Europe too. The problems with these systems aren't magically fixed in Western liberal democracies — even though the dystopia of what can go wrong is often immediately palpable under authoritarian regimes."

The ugly truth about ‘open’ A.I. models championed by Meta, Google, and other Big Tech players

In a paper published this past week, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the AI Now Institute, along with Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker, dove deep into what exactly is—and is not—open about current “open” A.I. systems.

What normal Americans — not AI companies — want for AI

To Sarah Myers West, managing director for the research center AI Now Institute, this public distrust is both appropriate and unsurprising. “I think people have learned from the past decade of tech-enabled crises,” she told me. “It’s quite clear when you look at the evidence that self-regulatory approaches don’t work.”

AI regulation is taking shape, but startups are being left out

AI Now sounded the alarm on Big AI’s influence with a report it released in April. The organization warned that companies led the narrative around AI, overstating the importance of the technology to the future and influencing how people think about it. AI Now believes the conversation should be led by regulators and the public.

The AI Crackdown Is Coming

Aware that blind trust in the benevolence of Big Tech is not an option, West and her team at the AI Now Institute this month published a new framework called “Zero Trust AI Governance.” It’s exactly what it sounds like — a call for lawmakers to take matters into their own hands.

America Already Has an AI Underclass

She and others argue that tech companies intentionally downplay the importance of human feedback. Such obfuscation “sockets away some of the most unseemly elements of these technologies,” such as hateful content and misinformation that humans have to identify, Myers West told me—not to mention the conditions the people work under.

Dispute over threat of extinction posed by artificial intelligence looms over surging industry

At present, essentially the way these systems work is akin to applied statistics, so they don't have any capacity for deeper understanding, don't have any capacity for empathy and certainly not sentience," Myers West added.