05/14/2024

Protesters Worldwide are Demanding a Pause on AI Development

They believe the companies are acting immorally

Just one week before the world’s second-ever global summit on artificial intelligence, protesters of a small but growing movement called “Pause AI” demanded that the world’s governments regulate AI companies and freeze the development of new cutting edge artificial intelligence models. They say that the development of these models should only be allowed to continue if companies agree to let them be thoroughly evaluated to test their safety first. Protests took place across thirteen different countries, including the U.S., the U.K, Brazil, Germany, Australia and Norway on Monday.

In London, a group of 20 or so protesters stood outside of the U.K.’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology chanting things like “stop the race, it’s not safe” and “who’s future? our future” with the hopes of attracting the attention of policy makers. The protestors say their goal is to get governments to regulate the companies developing frontier AI models, including OpenAI’s Chat GPT. They say that companies are not taking enough precautions to make sure their AI models are safe enough to be released into the world.

"[AI companies] have proven time and time again... through the way that these companies' workers are treated, with the way that they treat other people's work by literally stealing it and throwing it into their models, They have proven that they cannot be trusted," said Gideon Futerman, an Oxford undergraduate student who gave a speech at the protest.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.