Ethics teams are only useful if they are actively incorporated with and listened by engineering and business teams.
To put it another way: if you're making money regardless of ethics, or if you're building faster without ethics - it's not the fault of "ethics" if these ethical considerations are ignored.
"Move fast and break things" has been the motto of the Silicon Valley for decades. No reason for that to change when it comes to trampling ethical values (see: Cambridge Analytica and countless other examples).
In fact, even with these teams layed off, it's impossible to know whether or not they've been useful given that we don't even know how they're integrated within Microsoft/Meta/ClosedAI. (They've just been fired, so probably not well.)
IMO it's the same issue as climate change and gas/energy companies. There's greenwashing just as much as there's ethicswashing. Only when corporations realized that addressing climate change was more profitable did anyone change their ways (and they're still struggling to!). Same thing with ethics and AI.
rustlingdown t1_jcdjxlc wrote
Reply to In your experience, are AI Ethics teams valuable/effective? [D] by namey-name-name
Ethics teams are only useful if they are actively incorporated with and listened by engineering and business teams.
To put it another way: if you're making money regardless of ethics, or if you're building faster without ethics - it's not the fault of "ethics" if these ethical considerations are ignored.
"Move fast and break things" has been the motto of the Silicon Valley for decades. No reason for that to change when it comes to trampling ethical values (see: Cambridge Analytica and countless other examples).
In fact, even with these teams layed off, it's impossible to know whether or not they've been useful given that we don't even know how they're integrated within Microsoft/Meta/ClosedAI. (They've just been fired, so probably not well.)
IMO it's the same issue as climate change and gas/energy companies. There's greenwashing just as much as there's ethicswashing. Only when corporations realized that addressing climate change was more profitable did anyone change their ways (and they're still struggling to!). Same thing with ethics and AI.