#tinmitgebru — Public Fediverse posts

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.

.> Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.

.> While there are a number of recommendations in the letter that we agree with (and proposed in our 2021 peer-reviewed paper known informally as "Stochastic Parrots"), such as "provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic" media, these are overshadowed by fearmongering and AI hype, which steers the discourse to the risks of imagined "powerful digital minds" with "human-competitive intelligence." Those hypothetical risks are the focus of a dangerous ideology called longtermism that ignores the actual harms resulting from the deployment of AI systems today.