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Prominent Women in Tech Say They Don't Want to Join OpenAI's All-Male Board (www.wired.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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After internal chaos earlier this month, OpenAI replaced the women on its board with men. As it plans to add more seats, Timnit Gebru, Sasha Luccioni, and other AI luminaries tell WIRED why they wouldn't join.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Seems like the article is trying to combine two issues into one, the lack of representation of woman on OpenAI's Board, and the concerns of some prominent AI researchers (who happen to be women) about OpenAI's ambition and profitability above safety.

On the representation side, this seems like a chicken and egg problem where there won't be any change in diversity if no one wants to make a move because the board isn't already diverse enough.

And on the AI safety side, there won't be any change unless someone sits on the board and pushes for safety proactively, instead of reactively through legislation.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

there won't be any change unless someone sits on the board and pushes for safety proactively, instead of reactively through legislation.

There won't be any change because the board that pushed back just got replaced with people who won't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

And they're getting an opportunity to apply and bring back some balance, but decided not to.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

It also elides "AI safety" (Toner's thing) and "AI ethics" (Gebru's thing). They're two different things. Jammed together here because both are women (FFS).

"AI safety" is the sci-fi, paperclip maximisation, fantasies about the potential future of AI.

"AI ethics" is the real actual harms done in the here and now, by embedding existing biases into decision-making, and consuming enormous amounts of resource.

Meredith Whittaker sums up the difference nicely in this interview:

So in 2020-21 when Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell from Google’s AI ethics unit were ousted after warning about the inequalities perpetuated by AI, did you feel, “Oh, here we go again”?

Timnit and her team were doing work that was showing the environmental and social harm potential of these large language models – which are the fuel of the AI hype at this moment. What you saw there was a very clear case of how much Google would tolerate in terms of people critiquing these systems. It didn’t matter that the issues that she and her co-authors pointed out were extraordinarily valid and real. It was that Google was like: “Hey, we don’t want to metabolise this right now.”

Is it interesting to you how their warnings were received compared with the fears of existential risk expressed by ex-Google “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton recently?

If you were to heed Timnit’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared.

Geoff’s warnings are much more convenient, because they project everything into the far future so they leave the status quo untouched. And if the status quo is untouched you’re going to see these companies and their systems further entrench their dominance such that it becomes impossible to regulate. This is not an inconvenient narrative at all.