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Trade unions and rights campaigners have accused the UK government of “squeezing out” millions of workers from this week’s artificial intelligence summit, while giving too much influence to Big Tech.
An open letter to prime minister Rishi Sunak, sent on Monday and shared with the FT, said the “communities and workers most affected by AI have been marginalised by the summit”.
It is signed by more than 100 individuals and groups from around the world, including workers’ organisations such as the UK’s Trades Union Congress and the International Trade Union Confederation, and rights campaigners such as Amnesty International and Liberty.
“For many millions of people in the UK and across the world, the risks and harms of AI are not distant — they are felt in the here and now,” the letter says.
The AI safety summit, hosted by the UK government at Bletchley Park this week, will bring together political leaders, tech executives and some members of civil society to discuss the risks of frontier AI, an advanced type of the technology that powers products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“AI is already making life-changing decisions — like how we work, how we’re hired and who gets fired,” said TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell. “It shouldn’t just be tech bros and politicians who get to shape the future of AI.”
The letter criticised the guest list, drawn up by Sunak’s government, for giving a platform to Big Tech while wider society and industry are left out.
“Small businesses and artists are being squeezed out, and innovation smothered as a handful of Big Tech companies capture even more power and influence,” the letter said. “A wide range of expertise and the voices of communities most exposed to AI harms must have a powerful say and equal seat at the table.”
The letter was co-ordinated by the campaign group Connected By Data, the Trades Union Congress, representing 6mn UK workers, and the Open Rights Group, an online civil liberties campaigner.
Other signatories include The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the European Trade Union Confederation and the End Violence Against Women Coalition.
Analysis by Goldman Sachs has estimated about two-thirds of occupations are exposed to AI, with systems able to carry out between a quarter and a half of their workload.
Groups from industries expected to be most affected by generative AI, which can process and generate passages of humanlike text, have also signed the letter, including the National Education Union and the National Union of Journalists.
The two-day summit, which begins on Wednesday, will focus on specific risks which may be caused by AI, including its ability to assist in designing bioweapons or generating code for cyber attacks.
The letter spoke out against the summit as “a closed door event, overly focused on speculation about the remote ‘existential risks’ of ‘frontier’ AI systems”.
Jeni Tennison, executive director of Connected By Data, highlighted that AI is already causing harm through facial recognition and algorithmic bias. “Those are the things that we should be addressing,” she added.
The UK government said: “Our summit will bring together a wide range of international governments, academia, the companies pioneering AI and civil society to discuss the risks around the most advanced generation of highly capable AI models. This builds on a number of engagements leading up to the summit to ensure a diverse range of opinions and insights can directly feed into the discussions, as well as work taking place nationally and internationally in forums like the G20 and OECD to address broader risks.”
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