Oxford Professor Says AI Threat Is Bias, Discrimination, Environmental Impact

A University of Oxford professor said the threat of artificial intelligence (AI) centers on “bias, discrimination and the environmental impact.”

Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation, said these are issues “right here, right now,” as opposed to the “science fiction fantasy” raised in a recent statement signed by dozens of AI experts and pioneers, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (May 31).

Wachter was responding to the “Statement on AI Risk” posted by the Center for AI Safety and signed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and about 350 other people — many of them tech executives and scientists in the AI field.

The statement read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Wachter said that in contrast to this “Terminator scenario” that may or may not happen in a couple hundred years, the bias, discrimination and environmental impact of AI are immediate issues and can be measured, according to the report.

For example, cooling a mid-sized data center requires 360 gallons of water per day, Wachter said in the report.

“Let’s focus on people’s jobs being replaced,” Wachter said. “These things are being completely sidelined by the Terminator scenario.”

These reports follow other news of concerns about the use of AI now and in the future, particularly since the viral popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

For example, recent advancements in so-called large language models (LLMs) have raised fears that AI could soon be used at scale to spread misinformation and propaganda or that it could eliminate millions of white-collar jobs.

Other concerns around generative AI include all the data that goes into LLMs, questions about copyright infringement and privacy, and the use of AI output in phone scams.

Currently, there is no straightforward way to differentiate AI-generated content from authentic materials, according to “Preparing for a Generative AI World,” the May edition of the “Generative AI Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and AI-ID collaboration.

From a regulatory standpoint, there is a need to create an arena in which everyone can compete but with some level of control to ensure that the technology is not destructive, AI-ID founder and CEO Shaunt Sarkissian told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted Tuesday (May 30).