Experts Rip Musk For Using Their Work Seeking AI Pause

Four artificial intelligence (AI) experts have expressed concern after their work was cited in an open letter – co-signed by Elon Musk – demanding an urgent pause in research, Martin Coulter reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: Critics have accused the Musk-funded Future of Life Institute (FLI), which initiated the petition, of prioritizing imagined apocalyptic scenarios over more immediate concerns about AI.

The letter, dated March 22 and with more than 1,800 signatures by Friday, called for a six-month freeze in the development of systems "more powerful" than Microsoft-backed OpenAI's new GPT-4, which can hold human-like conversation, compose songs and summarize lengthy documents.

The open letter says AI systems with "human-competitive intelligence" pose profound risks to humanity, citing 12 pieces of research from experts including university academics as well as current and former employees of OpenAI, Google, and its subsidiary DeepMind.

Critics have accused the Musk-funded Future of Life Institute (FLI), which initiated the petition, of prioritizing imagined apocalyptic scenarios over more immediate concerns about AI, such as racist or sexist biases being programmed into the machines.

Among the papers cited was "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots," a well-known paper co-authored by Margaret Mitchell, who once oversaw ethical AI research at Google.

Her co-authors Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender criticized the letter on Twitter, with the latter branding some of its claims "unhinged." Mitchell, now chief ethical scientist at AI firm Hugging Face, slammed the letter, saying it was unclear what counted as "more powerful than GPT4."

By treating questionable ideas as a given, the letter asserts priorities and a narrative that benefits the supporters of FLI, she said.

"Ignoring active harms right now is a privilege that some of us don't have."

Musk is the last person to defend truth since his Twitter has become the disinformation hub of the world. They noted that Musk ordered staffers to multiply his stans, and the number of his followers zoomed past that of former US President Barack Obama, which proves Musk manipulates the social media platform.

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