Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how big tech's influence accelerates AI development at the expense of ethics and sustainability, highlighting societal and environmental impacts and proposing collective responsibility strategies.

Contribution

It analyzes the entanglement of big tech influence with AI ethics, societal impacts, and environmental concerns, and suggests alternative approaches beyond technical and regulatory solutions.

Findings

Big tech's focus on scaling AI conflicts with responsible development.

AI's societal and environmental harms are linked to economic incentives of big tech.

Collective action and actor responsibility are crucial for addressing AI challenges.

Abstract

The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing involvement of big tech. This has been accompanied by increasing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. In this article, we review and discuss how these phenomena are deeply entangled. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech and its underlying economic incentives. Finally, we argue that while it is important to develop technical and regulatory approaches to these challenges, these alone are insufficient to counter the distortion introduced by big tech's influence. We thus review and propose alternative strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.