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."
DW
Aug 23, 2023
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.
Fortune
Aug 22, 2023
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.”
Vox
Aug 18, 2023
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 Verge
Aug 8, 2023
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.
The Atlantic
Aug 7, 2023
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.
The Atlantic
Jul 26, 2023
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.
ABC News
Jul 21, 2023
Top tech firms commit to AI safeguards amid fears over pace of change
“We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models,” said Amba Kak, the executive director of research group the AI Now Institute.
The Guardian
Jul 21, 2023
How judges, not politicians, could dictate America’s AI rules
“It seems like the more straightforward path [toward an AI rulebook is] to start with the existing laws on the books,” says Sarah Myers West, the managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group.
MIT Technology Review
Jul 17, 2023
Google’s AI for Medicine Shows Clinical Answers More Than 90% Accurate
“There's all kinds of information that you would want to know, in order to meaningfully evaluate a system before it's deployed into commercial use,” she [Sarah Myers West] said. “And you need to look at this system at the level of each hospital, if they're going to be doing any kind of customization of a system for a particular clinical setting.”
Bloomberg
Jul 12, 2023
AI Is Hurting the Climate in a Number of Non-Obvious Ways
There is no absolute definition for what an AI technology is. But usually, as Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, describes, AI refers to algorithms that process large amounts of data to perform tasks like generating text or images, making predictions, or calculating scores and rankings.
The Markup
Jul 6, 2023
The FTC’s biggest AI enforcement tool? Forcing companies to delete their algorithms
“It really gets to the core of what is a common practice in the tech industry to use wide swaths of data, not necessarily for the purpose under which the data was originally obtained,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of AI Now and a former FTC adviser.
Cyberscoop
Jul 5, 2023
Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today
Letters written by tech-industry leaders are “essentially drawing boundaries around who counts as an expert in this conversation”, says Amba Kak, director of the AI Now Institute in New York City, which focuses on the social consequences of AI.
Nature
Jun 27, 2023
OpenAI’s CEO Goes on a Diplomatic Charm Offensive
Most focus on fears about what AI could potentially do in the future but ignore the here and now, said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former senior advisor on AI to the Federal Trade Commission. She cited concerns about the “very real harms that are unfolding before us right now,” from the spread of misinformation to exacerbating inequality.
Foreign Policy
Jun 20, 2023
Congress is racing to regulate AI. Silicon Valley is eager to teach them how.
West said executives like Google’s Schmidt are fueling the perception that AI is too difficult for Congress to grasp. That, she said, is “a convenient narrative that positions accountability out of the hands of the people that the public has vested it in — and into the hands of the industry that is benefiting.”
Washington Post
Jun 17, 2023
The EU is leading the way on AI laws. The US is still playing catch-up
“The companies that are leading the charge in the rapid development of [AI] systems are the same tech companies that have been called before Congress for antitrust violations, for violations of existing law or informational harms over the past decade,” said Sarah Myers West, the managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research organization studying the societal impacts of the technology.
The Guardian
Jun 13, 2023
The AI apocalypse: Imminent risk or misdirection?
Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) have quickly turned from the excited to the apocalyptic. Are warnings that AI could pose an existential threat valid, or do they distract from the real danger AI is already causing?
Al Jazeera
Jun 10, 2023
The Senate Is Getting a Crash Course on How to Regulate AI—From the AI Industry
“It’s such an irony seeing a posture about the concern of harm by people who are rapidly releasing into commercial use the system responsible for those very harms,” as Sarah Myers West, managing director of AI Now Institute, told the New York Times after Altman’s May testimony.
Vanity Fair
Jun 6, 2023
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