The 2023 Social Media Summit@MIT Event Report

WATCH VIDEO
ETHICAL AI:
A WORK IN
PROGRESS
Panelists explored tough challenges
raised by new content-generating tools
and urged awareness and regulation
Anthony Habayeb
Co-founder and CEO, Monitaur Inc.
Paris Marx
Newsletter and book author, and host of the Tech Won’t
Save Us podcast
Kalinda Ukanwa
Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Southern
California Marshall School of Business
Renée Richardson Gosline (Moderator)
Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management and
Human/AI Interface Research Group Lead, MIT IDE
Like most tools, generative AI can be put to use for many
purposes. It can create impressive new text and images from
existing content. But it also lacks oversight, and is guilty of
bias and hasty corporate rollouts.
The opportunities as well as the risks of new AI tools were
discussed by the Responsible, Human-First AI panel at the
Social Media Summit@MIT. The discussion, moderated
by MIT’s Renée Richardson Gosline, offered perspectives
from a business leader charged with implementing ethical
AI, an academic who is developing systems and future
programmers, and an outsider critiquing it all.
“Generative AI models have gained widespread adoption,”
Gosline said, citing reports that ChatGPT gained 100 million
users in just two months after its November 2022 launch. “But
what does this mean?”
AI in the Spotlight
AI isn’t actually new, noted Kalinda Ukanwa. “Whether we’re
selecting a movie from Netflix or using a GPS app to find our
way around a city, we’ve been interacting with AI all along,”
she said. “Yet people did not perceive that as AI. It was always
this thing that was running in the background.”
That’s changed with the advent of generative AI tools.
ChatGPT is now part of the “kitchen-table conversation,”
said Anthony Habayeb.
Concerns over the potential harms of generative AI have
extended to governments. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI,
the company that created ChatGPT, recently told the U.S.
Congress that AI needs more regulation. U.S. President
Biden, speaking to recent graduates of the country’s Air Force
Academy, worried aloud about AI’s ability to “overtake human
thinking.” And the European Union is considering a new
legal framework, known as the AI Act, that would regulate AI
development and use.
While Ukanwa doesn’t expect “to get to a place where [AI] is
not going to harm anybody,” she asked, “How do we minimize
that harm in an intelligent way?” Ukanwa’s recent research
paper, Algorithmic Fairness and Service Failures:
Why firms Should Want Algorithmic Accountability, makes
the case for third-party monitors of AI development, who
don’t have skin in the game.
Paris Marx sees a darker motive behind both the spread of
generative AI tools and the explosion of interest they’ve
generated. “These technologies are inherently political, less
in the sense of party politics and more in the term’s broader
meaning,” he said. “When these technologies are developed
and deployed, there are certain goals and desires.”
Marx views the hype over ChatGPT “getting the venture
capitalists excited again,” spurring investment, and getting
Microsoft to challenge Google so that responsible AI isn’t a
priority. But while platforms are publicly saying they’re going to
implement ChatCPT responsibly, “they’re laying off and firing
all of the AI ethicists,” Marx said.
AI bias is baked in by its human programmers, panelists noted,
whether consciously or not. In addition, generative AI tools rely
on already existing content, and they have no way of filtering
that content for bias or inaccuracies.
Responsible Solutions
Yet Habayeb sees solutions. “AI is built by people and it can
be managed,” he said. For instance, insurance company data
may be biased against a certain cohort causing higher rates.
“There might be other data that we can bring into an AI system
to make the pricing outcome more equitable,” Habayeb added.
Gosline said that while we can’t put the AI genie back in the
bottle, we can use AI more critically and deliberately. Ukanwa
sees the need for greater awareness, too. She recently
participated in a town hall meeting on AI, sponsored by a
Los Angeles radio station, that addressed generative AI
and its potential impact on society. “Afterwards,” Ukanwa
recounted, “people said, ‘I didn’t know these were the
implications of AI.’”
Marx clearly favors government oversight. He’s skeptical of
corporate motives for self-regulation that put profits over
social good. “There are many ways these technologies can be
rolled out in a negative way,” he said. “Unless there’s pressure
from the government,” consumer rights are not considered.
Could the profit versus ethics argument be false? Ukanwa
thinks so. “There’s this narrative that if I do something ethical,
I’m going to lose profits, and I can’t have both,” she said. “But a
lot of research is building a case that you can have both.”
There are good business reasons to develop fair algorithms,
Ukanwa said, adding, “This is what shareholders need
to understand.” Habayeb agreed: “Proactive governance
messaging is good for business.”
“A lot of research is building the
case that you don’t have to sacrifice
profits for business ethics.”
Kalinda Ukanwa
Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business
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