Inside OpenAI's Plan to Make AI More 'Democratic'
The company wants to align its AI to 'human values.' But whose?
In early November last year, I sat down opposite Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, at his San Francisco headquarters. My colleague Naina Bajekal and I were there to interview him about his breakout chatbot, ChatGPT, and the frenzy it had caused in the tech industry that year. Our reporting ended up at the center of a lengthy profile of Altman, who TIME named the 2023 CEO of the Year.
We spoke about a lot with Altman that day, and not everything made it into our piece. (Especially since OpenAI’s board fired and re-hired him just days after we’d filed our first draft, forcing us to rip up much of our work and start again.) In the months since, I kept thinking about one quote that we had to leave on the cutting room floor. “We have a new ability to do mass-scale direct democracy that we've never had before,” Altman told us. “AI can just chat with everybody and get their actual preferences.”
We were talking about how OpenAI should decide which rules should govern the way its AI systems behave. But the ramifications of Altman’s words seemed far more significant than that. What impact would increasingly powerful AIs begin to have on democracy? And how might democratic methods, in turn, be able to help ensure that those AIs benefited, rather than harmed, humanity?
It turns out OpenAI has been exploring that second question in depth. Last year, it gave $1 million in grants to researchers exploring ways to add “democratic inputs” to AI. And a couple of weeks ago, the company announced it was spinning up a new team internally to apply these principles to tools like ChatGPT and its other more powerful AI models.
I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to people close to this project, to tell its inside story. Here’s the lede:
One afternoon in early May 2023, Colin Megill nestled into a chair in a plant-filled meeting space at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. He was surrounded by seven staff from the world’s leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. He wanted Megill’s help.
The story is about the little-known effort inside OpenAI to explore how ordinary people, long excluded from decisions governing the technologies that profoundly impact their lives, could be empowered to decide the rules for AI. But it’s also about the powerful monetary forces that dominate the AI industry today, and what happens if (or perhaps when) the incentives of capital conflict with the will of the people. As you’ll see, it’s not a clear picture.
You can read the full story (no paywall!) in TIME. If you enjoy it, please share it online or with your friends. Or forward along this email. It helps more than you think.
What I’m reading
Everybody has to self-promote now. Nobody wants to.
By Rebecca Jennings in Vox
Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.
What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class
By Kenan Malik in the Guardian
At the heart of [E.P.] Thompson’s book is a reimagining of class and class consciousness. Class, he wrote, was “not a thing”, or a “structure”, but a “historical phenomenon” through which the dispossessed “as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” [...] His understanding of class not as a thing but as a relationship, and one not given but forged out of struggle, is as meaningful to this post-industrial age as it was in the analysis of the coming of industrialisation.
A Town Derailed
By Alejandro de la Garza in TIME
The result for this rust-belt town of 4,700 has been a permanent, surreal feeling, as if the derailment fire that lit up the night sky last February also fractured the town’s sense of reality. A spring Easter-egg hunt, sponsored by [train company] Norfolk Southern, is either evidence that things are getting back to normal, or else was an unconscionable threat to childrens’ health and safety. Contractors working in the culverts under the town’s municipal building are an indication of the train line’s thoroughness, or else a sign that it has something to hide. The town is perfectly safe, with a few loud mouths intent on scaring away business, or else the people here are living in a delusion, blithely ignoring the danger.
Final word
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