Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts
This work addresses the problem of ethical and sustainability issues in AI for society, highlighting the incremental nature of the analysis as a review and discussion.
The paper examines how big tech's influence on AI research drives scaling and general-purpose systems, which conflict with responsible, ethical, and sustainable AI development, and reviews environmental and societal impacts linked to this influence.
The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing involvement of big tech. This has been accompanied by increasing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. In this article, we review and discuss how these phenomena are deeply entangled. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech and its underlying economic incentives. Finally, we argue that while it is important to develop technical and regulatory approaches to these challenges, these alone are insufficient to counter the distortion introduced by big tech's influence. We thus review and propose alternative strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.