Google is sacrificing its ethical commitments in its race to keep up with the competition, according to current and former employees at the company and internal documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Google had pledged in 2021 to double its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and to pour more resources into assessing the technology’s potential harms. However, the debut of OpenAI’s popular chatbot in November 2022 sent Google scrambling to weave generative AI into all its most important products in a matter of months.
Read: Apple Card launches a high-yield savings account
The staffers responsible for the safety and ethical implications of new products have been told not to get in the way or try to kill any of the generative AI tools in development. In response to questions from Bloomberg, Google said responsible AI remains a top priority at the company, and it is continuing to invest in the teams working on applying its AI principles to technology.
Google, which over the years spearheaded much of the research underpinning today’s AI advancements, had not yet integrated a consumer-friendly version of generative AI into its products by the time ChatGPT launched. The company was cautious of its power and the ethical considerations that would go hand-in-hand with embedding the technology into search and other marquee products.
By December, senior leadership decreed a competitive “code red” and changed its appetite for risk. Google’s leaders decided that as long as it called new products “experiments,” the public might forgive their shortcomings. Still, it needed to get its ethics teams on board.
In February, one employee raised issues in an internal message group: “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.” The note was viewed by nearly 7,000 people, many of whom agreed that the AI tool’s answers were contradictory or even egregiously wrong on simple factual queries. The next month, Jen Gennai, the AI governance lead, overruled a risk evaluation submitted by members of her team stating Bard was not ready because it could cause harm. Shortly after, Bard was opened up to the public — with the company calling it an “experiment.”
As progress in AI accelerates, new concerns about its societal effects have emerged. Large language models, the technologies that underpin ChatGPT and Bard, ingest enormous volumes of digital text from news articles, social media posts and other internet sources, and then use that written material to train software that predicts and generates content on its own when given a prompt or query. That means that by their very nature, the products risk regurgitating offensive, harmful, or inaccurate speech.
Google is aiming to revitalize its maturing search business around cutting-edge technology, which could put generative AI into millions of phones and homes around the world — ideally before OpenAI, with the backing of Microsoft, beats the company to it. “AI ethics has taken a back seat,” said Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, which supports private messaging, and a former Google manager.
“If ethics aren’t positioned to take precedence over profit and growth, they will not ultimately work.” Silicon Valley is still wrestling with how to reconcile competitive pressures with safety. Researchers building AI outnumber those focused on safety by a 30-to-1 ratio, the Centre for Humane Technology said at a recent presentation, underscoring the often-lonely experience of voicing concerns in a large organization.
