Chatbots Got Big—and Their Ethical Red Flags Got Bigger
WiredIn the weeks following the release of OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT late last year, Google AI chief Jeff Dean expressed concern that deploying a conversational search engine too quickly might pose a reputational risk for Alphabet. Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, acknowledged that the bot could still “hallucinate” untrue information but said the technology had been made more reliable. The race to make large language models—AI systems trained on massive amounts of data from the web to work with text—and the movement to make ethics a core part of the AI design process began around the same time. In 2018, Google launched the language model BERT, and before long Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia had released similar projects based on the AI that is now part of Google search results.