Microsoft recently laid off 10,000 employees, including its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization. This has caused concern among current and former employees, as the company is leading the charge to make AI tools available to the mainstream without a dedicated team to ensure ethical AI principles are closely tied to product design. Microsoft’s decision to lay off its entire ethics and society team has raised questions about its commitment to ethical AI principles, and has left many current and former employees worried about the lack of a dedicated team to ensure ethical AI principles are closely tied to product design.
Microsoft is committed to developing AI products and experiences safely and responsibly. To ensure this, the company has an Office of Responsible AI that creates rules and principles to govern their AI initiatives. Despite recent layoffs, Microsoft is still investing in responsibility work and increasing the number of people across their product teams and within the Office of Responsible AI. The Ethics & Society team has done pioneering work to help Microsoft on their responsible AI journey, and the company is investing in people, processes, and partnerships to prioritize this.
The Ethics and Society team at a tech company has created a role-playing game called Judgment Call to help designers envision potential harms that could result from AI and discuss them during product development. This game is part of a larger responsible innovation toolkit that the team has made available to the public. This toolkit helps to ensure that the company’s responsible AI principles are implemented in the products they create, protecting users from potential harms. The toolkit is designed to help tech companies create products that are ethical, responsible, and safe for users.
Microsoft’s Ethics and Society team was reduced from 30 to 7 employees in October 2020. This has raised concerns about the potential risks of Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI’s technology and the speed at which it is being implemented. John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, said that company leaders had instructed them to move swiftly, raising questions about the company’s commitment to safety and ethical values. The reduction in size of the Ethics and Society team has caused alarm among those who are concerned about the potential risks of Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI’s technology.
Montgomery announced on a call that due to pressure, much of the team would be moved to other areas. One employee asked him to reconsider, citing the negative impacts the team had on society. Montgomery declined, saying the pressures remained the same, but assured the team that they would not be eliminated. Despite the team’s concern for the negative impacts they had on society, Montgomery’s decision to move the team to other areas remained unchanged.
Microsoft recently downsized its ethics and society team, transferring its members to other departments within the company. This move is part of a larger trend of decentralizing the responsibility for ethical considerations, placing more of the burden on individual product teams. The goal is to ensure that Microsoft’s products and services remain ethically sound while keeping up with the ever-evolving technology landscape. This shift is intended to help the company stay ahead of the curve and continue to provide ethically sound products and services.
Tech giants are facing tension between their product teams and their socially responsible divisions. The former wants to ship products quickly, while the latter must anticipate potential misuses of technology and fix any problems before they ship. This conflict has become increasingly visible as tech giants struggle to balance the need to protect their products from misuse and legal risks. To address this tension, tech giants must find a way to ensure their products are socially responsible while also allowing their product teams to ship products quickly.
Google faced a major backlash in 2020 when they fired ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru after she published a paper critical of the large language models. This incident has highlighted the need for companies to prioritize ethical considerations when developing AI tools. The departure of several top leaders within the department and damaged the company’s credibility on responsible AI issues. Microsoft’s focus on shipping AI tools quickly has shown that companies need to be mindful of ethical considerations when developing AI tools. Google’s ethics and society team had been supportive of product development, but the company’s leadership had become less interested in the team’s long-term thinking. This incident has shown that companies must prioritize ethical considerations when developing AI tools to ensure responsible use of AI technology.
Microsoft is investing heavily in OpenAI technology to gain a competitive edge against Google in search, productivity software, cloud computing, and other areas. With the relaunch of Bing, Microsoft has seen a surge in daily active users, with one third of them being new. Microsoft believes that every 1 percent of market share it can take away from Google in search would result in $2 billion in annual revenue, which is why the company has invested $11 billion into OpenAI. Microsoft is working to integrate OpenAI’s technology into its empire, aiming to gain a competitive advantage over Google and increase its revenue.
Microsoft is taking the risks posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) seriously, with three different groups dedicated to the issue. However, the recent elimination of Microsoft’s ethics and society team has raised concerns about the potential risks of OpenAI-powered tools. Companies must invest in teams dedicated to responsible AI development to ensure that the technology is used safely and ethically. To ensure this, Microsoft and other tech giants must continue to invest in teams dedicated to responsible AI development, to anticipate the consequences of releasing AI-powered tools to a global audience and ensure that the technology is used safely and ethically.
Microsoft recently launched the Bing Image Creator, a tool that uses OpenAI’s DALL-E system to generate images based on text prompts. While this technology has been met with enthusiasm, Microsoft researchers have identified potential risks to artists’ livelihoods, as it could enable people to easily copy their style. To protect the rights of artists, Microsoft has written a memo outlining the brand risks associated with the tool and suggesting ways to mitigate them. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that artists’ work is respected and protected, and is taking steps to ensure that their rights are respected.
Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator has been tested and found to be difficult to differentiate between the generated images and the original works of art. This could lead to brand damage for the artist and their financial stakeholders, as well as negative PR for Microsoft. To protect its brand and the artists’ works, Microsoft needs to take action to ensure that the generated images are not mistaken for the original works of art. This could include implementing measures such as watermarking, using different color palettes, or providing more information about the source of the images. By taking these steps, Microsoft can protect its brand and the artists’ works from potential damage.
OpenAI recently updated its terms of service to give users full ownership rights to images created with its AI-image generator, DALL-E. Microsoft’s ethics and society team expressed concern about this move, as it could lead to the replication of copyrighted works. To protect the rights of artists, Microsoft researchers proposed blocking Bing Image Creator users from using the names of living artists as prompts and creating a marketplace to sell an artist’s work if someone searches for their name. This would ensure that artists’ work is not replicated without their permission and help protect their rights.
Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, makers of the AI art generator Stable Diffusion, accusing them of using more than 12 million images without permission. This echoes concerns raised by Microsoft’s own AI ethicists a year prior, who warned that few artists had consented to allow their works to be used as training data. Microsoft launched their Bing Image Creator into test countries without implementing the strategies suggested by their AI ethicists, claiming the tool was modified to address the concerns. However, legal questions remain unresolved, leaving Getty Images to take action against Stability AI.
