We need a manifesto for Responsible AI

CILIP CEO, Nick Poole gave this speech at IFLA World Library and Information Congress, Rotterdam on 22nd August 2023. The speech is also featured on the CILIP AI hub

Thank you to my colleagues in the IFLA Government and Parliamentary Libraries Section for your kind invitation to speak here at the World Library and Information Congress.

I have been asked to address the theme of ‘AI: Partner or Rival’. This is a timely question – we have all to some extent been caught by the rapid arrival of the new wave of generative AI, and it is vitally important that we take time to explore the implications together.

However, my aim this morning is to try and reframe the question – away from how we respond to the first wave of generative AI tools such as Chat GPT and towards how we might take a leading role in guiding the next wave.

The first wave, the one which we have been in really since 2021, is characterized by technologies that are big, expensive, noisy, environmentally-costly and prone to making stupid mistakes. They are also hugely impressive in their scope and capabilities.

I believe that our professional community could hold the key to a second wave that is more person- and community-centred, smaller, more elegant, more democratic and more sustainable.

I want to explore this potential role through four lenses:

• Where we are today
• How we should respond as librarians and information professionals
• What the implications are for Government, and;
• Where we might be going next

The state-of-the-art

When I first studied AI and Natural Language Processing, in the early 1990’s, our work was guided by Alan Turing’s original vision of a universal computer – one which it would be impossible to programme and which would therefore need to learn through input and feedback.

Back then, the models on which AI was being trained were tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words. They were essentially competing for the ability to hold a ‘human-like’ conversation via chat interfaces over a period of a few minutes.

Fast-forward to today and AI has undoubtedly moved on immensely, but really only in one direction – brute force. Instead of more elegant models based on the distillation of knowledge, today’s LLMs really depend on ‘extreme’ computation, datasets of trillions of words and huge server farms.

We are, in reality, no closer to a Generalised Artificial Intelligence than we were in the 90’s. Instead, we are using brute-force computation to create convincing patterns.

The Anatomy of AI project by Ars Electronica has done an incredible job of showing the real environmental, social and economic cost of this brute-force approach. Your smart-home device is just a dumb client which sends voice queries to distant server farms for processing and response.

As Ars Electronica writes in their long-form essay, “Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fuelled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labour, and data.”

As ethical information professionals, we must not just learn to accommodate AI in our work. We must also push for responsible AI that minimizes these damaging impacts.

Read the full speech here:

https://www.cilip.org.uk/news/650937/We-need-a-manifesto-for-Responsible-AI.htm

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