Current access risks

The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants

Gabriel et al. (2024)

Source DOI

Sub-category

Risk Domain

6Socioeconomic & Environmental

6.1Power centralization and unfair distribution of benefits

AI-driven concentration of power and resources within certain entities or groups, especially those with access to or ownership of powerful AI systems, leading to inequitable distribution of benefits and increased societal inequality.

"At the same time, and despite this overall trend, AI systems are also not easily accessible to many communities. Such direct inaccessibility occurs for a variety of reasons, including: purposeful non-release (situation type 1; Wiggers and Stringer, 2023), prohibitive paywalls (situation type 2; Rogers, 2023; Shankland, 2023), hardware and compute requirements or bandwidth (situation types 1 and 2; OpenAI, 2023), or language barriers (e.g. they only function well in English (situation type 2; Snyder, 2023), with more serious errors occurring in other languages (situation type 3; Deck, 2023). Similarly, there is some evidence of ‘actively bad’ artificial agents gating access to resources and opportunities, affecting material well-being in ways that disproportionately penalise historically marginalised communities (Block, 2022; Bogen, 2019; Eubanks, 2017). Existing direct and indirect access disparities surrounding artificial agents with natural language interfaces could potentially continue – if novel capabilities are layered on top of this base without adequate mitigation (see Chapter 3)."(p. 152)

Entity— Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent— Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal