Journalist Karen Hao has
spent years reporting on OpenAI and the global AI industry, and in her book Empire of AI, she argues this isn’t just a story about technology, it’s a story about ideology, labour, resources and control.
She told The Front Page it’s not just that these companies are powerful, but that they accumulate economic and political power by extracting from the rest of the world.
“That is, dispossessing their resources, whether it’s data, land, energy, or water. It is exhausting their labour by exploiting it as part of the AI development process and by creating labour-automating technologies that erode labour rights around the world, and through the control of information.
“And they wrap up all of their activities in this narrative that they’re good empires on a civilising mission to bring progress and modernity to all of humanity. So what is more imperial than that?”
OpenAI’s original non-profit mission started sincerely, with the promise it would share research and build AI for humanity’s benefit.
But after years of following the company’s trajectory, Hao said its real aim was always to become the dominant AI lab in the world.
“One of the narratives that OpenAI always told in the beginning was, ‘We are going to be collaborative across the industry. We are not trying to compete with people. We’re not trying to engage in a race to the bottom, because that is what’s going to create more and more reckless AI development, and then lead to negative consequences on society’.
“But through my reporting in the book, I found that the competition was always a core part of how the organisation made decisions.
“Whenever there was a hint of Google, and later on, other competitors, potentially beating them to releasing a particular version of a technology, they immediately shortchanged their decision-making processes to race it past all the checks and get there first.
“And so this once again goes back to the goal that the organisation has always had, that the founders have always had, which is to be No 1, to dominate, and to do whatever it takes to get there,” she said.
Karen Hao appears at the Auckland Writers Festival, which runs until May 17. Tickets are available at the Aotea Centre box office. For more information, visit writersfestival.co.nz.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Hidden human labour and harms
- Chatbots are being designed to feel human
- Public resistance
- The future of AI.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
