After years of companies emphasizing the potential of artificial intelligence, researchers say it is now time to reset expectations.
With recent leaps in the technology, companies have developed more systems that can produce seemingly humanlike conversation, poetry and images. Yet AI ethicists and researchers warn that some businesses are exaggerating the capabilities—hype that they say is brewing widespread misunderstanding and distorting policy makers’ views of the power and fallibility of such technology
He and other researchers say that imbalance helps explain why many were swayed earlier this month when an engineer at Alphabet Inc.’s Google argued, based on his religious beliefs, that one of the company’s artificial-intelligence systems should be deemed sentient.
The engineer said the chatbot had effectively become a person with the right to be asked for consent to the experiments being run on it. Google suspended him and rejected his claim, saying company ethicists and technologists have looked into the possibility and dismissed it.
In reality, artificial intelligence encompasses a range of techniques that largely remain useful for a range of uncinematic back-office logistics like processing data from users to better target them with ads, content and product recommendations.
Over the past decade, companies like Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. have invested heavily in advancing such capabilities to power their engines for growth and profit.
Google, for instance, uses artificial intelligence to better parse complex search prompts, helping it deliver relevant ads and web results.
A few startups have also sprouted with more grandiose ambitions. One, called OpenAI, raised billions from donors and investors including Tesla Inc. chief executive Elon Musk and Microsoft Corp. in a bid to achieve so-called artificial general intelligence, a system capable of matching or exceeding every dimension of human intelligence. Some researchers believe this to be decades in the future, if not unattainable.
Competition among these firms to outpace one another has driven rapid AI advancements and led to increasingly splashy demos that have captured the public imagination and drawn attention to the technology.
OpenAI’s DALL-E, a system that can generate artwork based on user prompts, like “McDonalds in orbit around Saturn” or “bears in sports gear in a triathlon,” has in recent weeks spawned many memes on social media.
Google has since followed with its own systems for text-based art generation.
While these outputs can be spectacular, however, a growing chorus of experts warn that companies aren’t adequately tempering the hype.
Margaret Mitchell, who co-led Google’s ethical AI team before the company fired her after she wrote a critical paper about its systems, says part of the search giant’s sell to shareholders is that it is the best in the world at AI.
Ms. Mitchell, now at an AI startup called Hugging Face, and Timnit Gebru, Google’s other ethical AI co-lead—also forced out—were some of the earliest to caution about the dangers of the technology.
In their last paper written at the company, they argued that the technologies would at times cause harm, as their humanlike capabilities mean they have the same potential for failure as humans. Among the examples cited: a mistranslation by Facebook’s AI system that rendered “good morning” in Arabic as “hurt them” in English and “attack them” in Hebrew, leading Israeli police to arrest the Palestinian man who posted the greeting, before realizing their error.
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