Labor Manipulation, Theft, and Displacement
Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards
Electronic Privacy Information Centre (2023)
Social and economic inequalities caused by widespread use of AI, such as by automating jobs, reducing the quality of employment, or producing exploitative dependencies between workers and their employers.
Major tech companies have also been the dominant players in developing new generative AI systems because training generative AI models requires massive swaths of data, computing power, and technical and financial resources. Their market dominance has a ripple effect on the labor market, affecting both workers within these companies and those implementing their generative AI products externally. With so much concentrated market power, expertise, and investment resources, these handful of major tech companies employ most of the research and development jobs in the generative AI field. The power to create jobs also means these tech companies can slash jobs in the face of economic uncertainty. And externally, the generative AI tools these companies develop have the potential to affect white-collar office work intended to increase worker productivity and automate tasks(p. 44)
Sub-categories (2)
Job Automation Instead of Augmentation
"There are both positive and negative aspects to the impact of AI on labor. A White House report states that AI “has the potential to increase productivity, create new jobs, and raise living standards,” but it can also disrupt certain industries, causing significant changes, including job loss. Beyond risk of job loss, workers could find that generative AI tools automate parts of their jobs—or find that the requirements of their job have fundamentally changed. The impact of generative AI will depend on whether the technology is intended for automation (where automated systems replace human work) or augmentation (where AI is used to aid human workers). For the last two decades, rapid advances in automation have resulted in a “decline in labor share, stagnant wages[,] and the disappearance of good jobs in many advanced economies.”
6.2 Increased inequality and decline in employment qualityDevaluation of Labor & Heightened Economic Inequality
"According to a White House report, much of the development and adoption of AI is intended to automate rather than augment work. The report notes that a focus on automation could lead to a less democratic and less fair labor market...In addition, generative AI fuels the continued global labor disparities that exist in the research and development of AI technologies... The development of AI has always displayed a power disparity between those who work on AI models and those who control and profit from these tools. Overseas workers training AI chatbots or people whose online content has been involuntarily fed into the training models do not reap the enormous profits that generative AI tools accrue. Instead, companies exploiting underpaid and replaceable workers or the unpaid labor of artists and content creators are the ones coming out on top. The development of generative AI technologies only contributes to this power disparity, where tech companies that heavily invest in generative AI tools benefit at the expense of workers.
6.2 Increased inequality and decline in employment qualityOther risks from Electronic Privacy Information Centre (2023) (21)
Information Manipulation
4.1 Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scaleInformation Manipulation > Scams
4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulationInformation Manipulation > Disinformation
4.1 Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scaleInformation Manipulation > Misinformation
3.1 False or misleading informationInformation Manipulation > Security
4.2 Cyberattacks, weapon development or use, and mass harmInformation Manipulation > Clickbait and feeding the surveillance advertising ecosystem
3.2 Pollution of information ecosystem and loss of consensus reality