Google says goodbye to explicit renunciation of AI weapons
Google has long been committed to not providing AI technology for weapons development and has even foregone money to do so. Now this has come to an end.
(Image: YueStock/Shutterstock.com)
After more than six years, Google is saying goodbye to its self-imposed ethics rules, in which the company pledged not to develop or provide AI technologies for weapons systems or surveillance. This emerges from a blog entry in which the revision of the company's own AI principles is justified, among other things, by the rapid progress in the development of the technology. In it, the heads of the “Technology and Society” department and the Google subsidiary DeepMind write that AI companies, governments, and organizations should instead now work together to protect national security, among other things.
The wind has changed
Google imposed its ethical guidelines for the development of AI systems in mid-2018, long before the recent hype surrounding generative AI. At that time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai listed goals for the company's own AI efforts and explained that the restrictions were in line with its responsibility as a leading company in the industry. Meanwhile, this has grown significantly, and the competitive situation has changed. Due to the ethics rules, Google decided in 2018 not to bid on a USD 10 billion tender for the operation of a cloud system for the US Department of Defense. It is unlikely that the company would now forgo that much money.
Videos by heise
Google's U-turn on the development of AI systems for weapons comes about a year after a similar U-turn at OpenAI. Back then, the ChatGPT developers deleted a passage in the terms of use that prohibited the language models from being used for “military and warfare”. A few days ago, the AI company then announced a partnership with US research institutions to work on the security of nuclear weapons, among other things. It stands to reason that the latest steps can also be considered a concession to the new US President, who has long been sharply critical of the major IT companies.
(mho)
